


Standing

by orphan_account



Series: Standing Verse [3]
Category: AFI
Genre: Adultry, Angst, Implied self-injury, Los Angeles, M/M, graphic het, my take on canon, the Standing universe
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-24
Updated: 2015-01-24
Packaged: 2018-03-08 22:07:30
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 28,889
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3225185
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Davey has always been better at lying and taking than Jade is.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is the third, final, (and grossly, longest) installment of the Standing series. It takes place after Standing, Still, during the Crash Love era. It's also from Davey's POV. Weird, I know.

June 2008

Davey is driving down the 101 freeway, and after eight hours of foot to the gas, the exhausted muscle in his calf is twitching, stiff and sore and spasming. He started with a Luna bar and some Kombutcha, but there’s nothing but gas stations on the 5 freeway which runs like a jugular through California. It’s the only real way to get from north to south, so Davey is always forced to sustain himself on dry cereal, swedish fish, trail mix, and awful coffee. He kind of likes it though, the self-abuse this drive warrants, how he can’t take care of himself when he decides to go south. 

After all, Davey is waiting to be absolved. Unwashed and unhewn and unshaven, this is how he drives hellbound: in squalor and junk food wrappers. He’s in his oldest pajama bottoms, and the shirt he went out dancing in three days ago, with the yellow sweat stains in the underarms. Most of his face is obscured by expensive sunglasses, which reflect the oil towers that hulk on either side of the road like great metal animals. If he squints,(which he should refrain from doing while driving), they blur and look nearly alive, and he can pretend he’s driving through a zoo instead of the shittier half of the state. 

If it’s a zoo, a jungle, then he’s a hero returning from a great expedition tattered and broken and parched, staggering through the last leg of his journey until he can arrive on the doorstep and be absolved again. Home again. 

Davey’s good at pretending, though if you ask anyone else they might use the word “faking” instead. Lying, perhaps. Regardless, if years of this drive have taught him anything, they’ve taught him that pretending, and the hard-earned capacity to twist his own reality, are the only thing of any real importance to him. That way, Davey is a hero: cunning and clever and at once both imperfect and unattainable. The stuff of legend. Of rockstars. 

That way, he can forget he is actually an old man, wasting gas on a freeway surrounded by machines. This broken hypocrite with tired eyes and unwashed hair. He’s returning not as the incarnate, just a guy waiting to die and passing the time by doing what animals do: fucking. Dirty, unhewn, some less-than-half of an affair. 

He signals then exits the freeway, slowing his suv to a jerky stop at the all too familiar light. There’s trash on the side of the road, empty Dos Equis bottles shattered to an amber dust, Doritos bags and wads of toilet paper on the asphalt slopes by the offramp where kids go to party at night. Closer to the oil towers now, even if he shuts his eyes and imagines them, they still don’t look like animals. Just greasy black metal, pump-pumping away. Nothing alive, just as Davey is no hero. A human, a bad driver on a bad freeway, and he needs a shower. 

There’s no baptism in Davey’s future. Nothing, really, but oil and disappointment. 

But that’s why he’s driving to Jade’s.


	2. Chapter 2

April, 2008

It’s always summer in LA, so when Davey finds out on April 24th, it’s sweltering outside. He’s shirtless in his apartment, sweating and cleaning out his closet for the umpteenth time when gets a text from Jade that reads: _i told her_

He disregards it. He has to. It doesn’t mean what he hopes it means (it _can’t_ ) and even if by some miracle it does, then what? What does that even _mean_? He’s never really even entertained the possibility, so there’s just a tremendous sprawling vacancy in his heart at the very prospect. So when the text comes, Davey knits his brows, deletes it immediately, then tosses his phone back on the bed where it disappears between two piles of monochrome clothing. He assumes for his own sanity that the text was intended for someone else, and Jade fucked up and chose the wrong name on his contacts list. 

When it vibrates again, Davey’s stomach plummets to the floor. He can’t help it, can’t help himself from tearing through the mess of (so many shades) of black until his fists closes around plastic, and he illuminates the screen. It says: _please, dave. i need to talk to you. will you call me?_

Davey stands staring at his phone for a long time, torn between screaming as he vaults it across the room so it would shatter on the opposite wall into fragments of silicone and glass, and collapsing into a heap on his floor to sob in combined relief and terror. 

Because Davey’s mind does this when he is thrown into any kind of desperation, he imagines his own blood rising to the surface of a clean, white valley. Tiny pinpricks of crimson, his fingers digging them out. But it’s been a long time since he actually did that, so instead he closes his eyes and counts to ten, holding his phone and a faded, ancient Danzig teeshirt he really needs to throw the fuck out. 

There’s nothing to say over the phone, so after a moment of debate, Davey texts back, _I’m at my apartment_. He spends the next half hour beginning to clean the shit out of his room before deciding Jade’s not worth cleaning up for, stopping, then neutralizing his anxiety by mindlessly cleaning again. 

When Jade rings the doorbell, Davey puts on a shirt, and makes himself walk calmly to answer it. He opens the door and they look at each other. Jade stands outside with his hands jammed in his pockets, eyes obscured by sunglasses, and a sheen of sweat on his forehead so the fine blonde strands of the fringe adhere to his brow. Davey stands there, staring at him for perhaps too long of a time. Because it’s conditioned at this point, his mouth goes dry, and his heart is spurred into frantic motion. 

“Okay, here we go,” he says instead of come in, and Jade follows him to the seldom-used living room, where they sit on opposite couches. With his head in his hands, Jade’s eyes are fixed on the carpet,while Davey’s burn tunnels through Jade’s body, withering it to ashes. 

“Well,” Davey sighs after a moment. He doesn’t offer Jade water, because he rather likes watching him suffer. Jade glances up, takes off his sunglasses and reveals his swollen eyes, tired and sunken and red-rimmed. He looks terribly old. 

“I told her about this,” he finally says. And there it is, what Davey’s been waiting for, what he’s always known either wouldn’t come, or wouldn’t change anything even if it did. And of course, Jade uses that word, _this_. Noncommittal and cowardly like the rest of him, not even _it_ , because that requires him to take more responsibility... _this_ is at least _this between you and me_ , something Jade only has partial ownership of. It is too hard to say, and never, ever would he even think to utter the word _us_. 

“So you said,” Davey tries to stay cold but he always falters. “What prompted you to...” He trails off, clears his throat, silenced by his own shame. 

“I couldn’t live with it anymore,” Jade says hollowly. 

“Ah.” Davey is neither shocked nor disappointed: he expects nothing more than selfishness from either of them at this point, after all these years. 

“She didn’t even cry. She just...took it. Like it was a business transaction,” Jade explains, breaking their sort-of-agreement to not discuss her. Davey stills at the word _she_ , but stays quiet, wanting Jade to talk, to answer the questions that are begging to tumble out of him like ice water, just so he doesn’t have to stand the humiliation of asking them too eagerly. 

“She said she wasn’t surprised...like she always knew but didn’t want to believe it.” 

Davey can’t stand it, and blurts venomously, “Oh _that’s_ a shocker.” 

Jade ignores him, knows too well that every stinging word from Davey is motivated by something as pathetic and small and defenseless as hurt. “I mean, she was surprised my _me_ , not by you and I...she knew there was _something_ , I just didn’t think she believed it was mutual, or that it still had me. She kept on saying ‘but you hate him!’ like hate and love were two separate things.” 

They’re mired in heavy silence for awhile, and Davey remembers a year or so ago, when he took off the necklace he used to wear. It was a gift to himself, but was always somehow about Jade, who would grip it in his fist when he was fucking Davey from behind and leave tender red indentations in the flesh of Davey’s neck. It was two heavy heart pendants on a ball chain, one reading _love_ , the other _hate_. He took it off eventually. Not when Jade left, but when he knew Jade wasn’t coming back. 

The two were always inextricably connected for him, even from the beginning. Even when he loved Jade, he hated him on some level for _knowing_ him, for _having him,_ against his will. Against his own hand. He knows Jade gets it, (and she must _not_ ) so he looks at him hard, latching onto and savoring everything about this moment of exclusive, mutual, tacit understanding. It reminds him fleetingly of how things used to be, and then it’s gone, and they’re terribly old again. 

“What are you going to do now?” Davey shatters the silence, his voice a broken thing like the deflated bag of an accordion.

“I don’t know. She didn’t give me any ultimatums or anything, she just went to her sister’s place. To get her head together, she said. She’s staying there for awhile, I guess,” Jade mumbles. 

“Well then, you should go home,” Davey responds curtly, giving the response he wishes he’ll enforce, what he wishes he’ll stand by. Jade’s eyes cut sharply up to him, blown open and all black, things lost at sea. 

And Davey wishes he was a bigger person, wishes that _now, now_ that he’s got what he wants, and Jade’s begging on his knees homeless and hopeless, he can say, _I’m done. I don’t need you anymore. You can go back to her, now that she might not even want you anymore. You’re alone now, as alone as you left me._

But Davey’s not a bigger person, so he stops fighting the the balloon of sickened elation in his chest and stands up on shaking legs, fists a hand in Jade’s shirt collar, and drags their bruised mouths together with an animal hiss. 

~*~

February 2008

Davey always knew he would kill himself. It was just a matter of time. 

That was what was scrawled on every journal and lyric booklet Davey owned when he was twenty years old and a magnificent idiot. It was a doctrine he lived by, a universal truth he constructed the scaffolding of his careful image around. Infallibly, it was his destiny. His life’s work. 

The plan was to spend as much of his life as it took slaving away on his image, producing song after song and album after album until he was presented _exactly_ the way he wanted to be presented, and then he’d finally be allowed to die. Complete, and whole, and framed. An artist, innocent and preserved in a jar of fromalin people would weep over and refuse to dissect on principle. 

But then Davey falls in love with Jade, and everything gets fucked up. 

Davey’s love affair with the idea of death ends shortly before his love affair with Jade begins. Before Jade, Davey would stare ahead at all the miserable, exhausting years of despair yawning before him like a mouth full of desert and cracked teeth, this impossible and unconquerable landscape he didn’t think he was capable of crossing. Before Jade, Davey was just _waiting_ to die. 

It was a strange thing, loving Jade. Because once he gave into its sway, Davey realized with a horrible truth that his future wasn’t barren anymore. In fact, the frantic fear he used to feel when he imagined _how fucking long_ he had left, how many years stretching before him, was replaced with the frantic fear of a tick-ticking clock. Time suddenly terrified Davey. Instead of thinking, _I can’t imagine living another day, how on earth will I last another year?_ Davey thought, _I cannot imagine only living a lifetime with him. It’s simply not long enough._

With suicide losing its appeal, Davey had to find something else. And that was when death stopped being absolute, and loving Jade became suicide. So Davey threw himself into it with all of himself, all of his body, and more than his heart. Everything. Davey still, to this day, cannot turn away from absolutism. It will be his curse, forever and always, to kill himself. It just so happened that in 1999, he killed himself by loving Jade. 

It’s not even that he can _help it_ , throwing himself into things. He’s an extremist, and he seeks extremes beyond his own will. Davey decided a long time ago that if one wanted to stay sane, they should avoid the most powerful things in life. But sanity wasn’t, _isn’t_ , his aim. Absolutism is, and the way he loves Jade, _hates_ Jade, the way Jade hurts him...even though it’s centimeters away from unbearable, it’s the biggest thing he feels. It is the most absolute, more absolute than death, for certain, so Davey will tie himself to the train tracks again, and again. 

If it wasn’t more absolute, Davey would have killed himself a long time ago. 

There are an infinite number of reasons Davey resents Jade, but near the top of that never ending list is the fact that in the Summer of 2006, Jade renounced absolutism, and incidentally, Davey, for the safety of not fearing death. And Davey _hates him_ for it. 

And still, even now, Davey hates him for it. Three years later they’re in the studio and everyone else has left, so Davey and Jade cross paths without talking. It’s one of those days, when they can’t meet eyes without something catastrophic happening, fighting or fucking or the world falling down like a movie set around them, proving they’re just actors; they’re just going through the motions. 

Davey tongues the place in his lip where he used to have a ring. He’s spent more years of his life with metal there than not, so this newfound, raw smoothness is still a novelty. He can hear Jade behind him, unplugging things and cleaning up, busying his hands so he doesn’t have to acknowledge he’s alone in a room with someone who hates him. Davey is so deeply in his mind Jade’s quiet motions seem somehow superfluous, separate from himself. Maybe it’s this imagined distance that makes Davey speak, but before he knows it, he’s decided it’s perfectly acceptable for him to ask Jade “Did you get what you wanted?” 

Jade’s hands stop, and he stands up straight with a testy weight about him. Because, of course, it’s not an acceptable thing to say. “Pardon?” 

Davey intakes breath sharply, realizing he’s not making sense. He turns around to meet Jade’s eyes, and he’s sure he must look furious when he asks again, more carefully this time, because its exactly what he means: “Are you afraid to die?” 

Jade stares and stares, shaking his head slowly and tapping his foot, his lips disappearing to a flat line. He looks like he wants to turn on his heel and storm out the door, get in his car, and drive back to fucking _Eden_ where things are effortless and time isn’t a threat because he’s not _really_ happy, and Davey think’s he’s going to, but instead he answers, “No.” 

“So it worked then,” Davey says bitterly, eyes stinging with something he wishes was pure resentment, but is a much muddier color. 

“What worked?” 

It’s been a long day of silence and Davey’s job is screaming, so everything is rushing inside of him somehow falls out of his mouth in an indecipherable mess of fury. “ _How the fuck_ could you, Jade? How can you live with yourself knowing that you gave up love, you gave up everything with me so you could return to the comfort of _not fearing death_? I’m sure it’s wonderful, to know you can fucking kill yourself any day you want and know it won’t matter.” He spits it out in one frothy, boiling puddle of rage, and Jade’s face twists, red and ugly in response. 

“Is _that_ what you tell yourself, Dave? Is _that_ why you think I did it?” 

“Why the hell else would you do it if you’re not a coward?! Why else, if you weren’t running from what you felt when you loved me? You _want_ to have death as an option, as something you can fall back on when shit gets too hard. Then you don’t have to be scared of anything, of time.” Davey hates every word coming out of his mouth. Because he doesn’t sound strong, or like an artist, or like someone who recklessly pursues absolutes regardless of the potentially lethal consequences. He just sounds pathetic. Deluded. Out of control. 

Jade calls him on it, right afuckingway, “Listen to yourself. You’re not speaking for me, you’re speaking for _you_! Because you’re too profoundly selfish to think that anyone else in the world might _not think of things in terms of their own death_. Dave, you are so fucking obsessed with dying. Maybe I grew out of that. Maybe I left you because I didn’t want to be with someone who wanted to _die_ all the time.” 

Jade’s treading in dangerous territory. Davey doesn’t _like_ to think of himself the way he was when he was _actually_ depressed, when he was sick. Those years some time before he lost his voice, when breathing was hard and Jade stayed and spoon-fed him until he could stand on his own again. It’s not fair to bring that year up, because it was beyond his control. He wasn’t an artist then, he wasn’t even a human. He was a sleeping, eating, shitting organism, and Jade breathed for him. 

“Fuck you,” he says quietly. 

“No, fuck you. Fuck. You. I’m so sick of hearing about how afraid you think I am of everything,” Jade’s hastily shoving things in his backpack. A water bottle, his keys, his ipod with the headphones wound so carefully around it. Davey watches each item disappear, and feels the familiar sensation of loss aching in his chest. 

“You can lie to yourself all you want, but I _know,_ I _know_ how scared you were. How scared you _are_ , because look at you, you’re fucking running _again_ , because you don’t like what I’m saying.” Davey is yelling but he’s not so sure of himself anymore. He paces, watching the linoleum floor of the studio whir underneath his slip-on vans like something moving faster than he can walk. 

“Did you ever think, for one _second,_ Dave, that I didn’t leave you because I was scared? That there was a possibility it _wasn’t_ me, but it was _you_? and that I left just because you were, and still are, _fucking crazy??_ ” Jade screams at him, loud enough Davey actually stops and stares. Jade rarely says anything above a bored-mumble, because he’s never sure it’s what he wants to say. His sureness, and Davey’s lack therof, stand in stark contrast to the way Davey sees both of them in his mind, and for one second he knows Jade’s right, and that he’s been crazy this whole time. 

Too much love in his body for anyone else to match, and he should have held back, kept it in a bucket. One should always avoid the most powerful things in life if they want to survive, and Davey’s not an artist, he’s just like everyone else, and he wants to live. He’s afraid of death in this one second, even with Jade telling him he’s been wrong about every white-lie he built his resentment on. 

Jade crashes out of the studio and Davey stays for a long time, standing with the lights out wondering why he didn’t kill himself when he was young and beautiful enough he could do so without being unwept. And there’s nothing interesting about him right now, not his tattooed skin, not his flawed body of work. 

~*~

March 2009

It’s 4 am and Davey must have dozed off. His doorbell is ringing, a constant siren-drone followed by a blessed second of silence, followed by two bleats again. The desperate quality of the ringing makes Davey think whoever is out there has been at it for awhile, waiting for the sound to filter out of Davey’s half dream and bring him back to reality. He sits bolt upright in his cold bed, suddenly aware of an ache in his neck and a film of sweat on his chest, and he stumbles out of the sheet-tangle and down the stairs. He throws the door open with clumsy hands and there is Jade, barefoot and bloodshot, startled like he almost hadn’t expected Davey to open the door of his own house. His car is in the driveway, lights on and the driver’s side still open like he couldn’t even stand to wait for the second it took to close it. 

“It’s you,” Davey says stupidly, running a hand through his hair self-consciously. It flops down onto his forehead, weak without the gel to keep it vertical. “I thought you weren’t coming until Friday.” 

“I know,” Jade says quickly. His breath smells like coffee, and he taps his long fingers on the buckle of his belt, which isn’t through one of the loops near his hip. Davey imagines hooking his index finger through it, but knows they don’t touch that easily anymore. 

“Do you want to come in?” Davey asks because it’s the right thing to do, rubbing his feet together and shuffling along his doormat. Jade looks down, at the winged bunny tattoo on the top of Davey’s elegant foot, the fuchsia polish which is chipped on all but the smallest toe. 

“Yeah, yeah. If that’s okay,” Jade’s eyes flash with something unreadable and fragile, like words on the tip of the tongue. Davey is impossibly moved by this, and he wishes he could drink the color of Jade’s eyes, that the honey brown iris was something he could press his tongue into. Maybe because it’s late, he doesn’t stop himself from thinking this, doesn’t stop himself from thinking Jade’s beautiful, shivering and disheveled. 

“Where are your shoes?” He asks gently, then they both kind of laugh. 

“I guess I forgot them in the car. I had to take them off, the drive was too boring to wear shoes the whole time. It felt wrong to not feel the pedals with my skin when they were essentially there for eight hours or something...” Jade trails off, eyes cutting to the porch light, with its crust of dead gnats and flies clinging to the bulb. There’s one moth fluttering stupidly around it, dusty and white and unaware of how close it is to dying. 

Then his eyes snap back to Davey, bright with only just contained fire. Jade says “I’m sorry.” Then simply: “I couldn’t wait.” 

The breath is forced from Davey’s lungs as Jade storms in and presses him to the doorframe, trapping his small body between the unforgiving solidity of the wall, and the crushing force of pent up want, hungry lips, and the mindless roving of hands. 

Ignoring the lighthouse they thrash together, a ship snagging its hull to splintered boards against jagged sea-rocks. Davey’s body sighs _thank you, thank everything, thank god_ which is a crazy thing for Davey to think, and his skin crawls with comfort and longing under the roughness of Jade’s palms, which scrape into and over him like they don’t know how to stop. 

“God,” is the first thing that falls from Davey’s swollen mouth when Jade pulls away, his voice broken and keening. Then Davey laughs, the shudder of it rippling under Jade’s lips The porch light is on, the car light is on, and two doors are open, but Jade is touching him still, clawing at his hips and ribcage and the planes of inked muscle that flex along Davey’s back. 

“Fuck,” Jade growls, suddenly forcing Davey’s arms open on either side of him like he’s being crucified. Then they’re pressing together again, with a frantic, _not close enough not nearly--_ quality that Davey’s used to, that Davey remembers when he thinks he’s going insane. “This...this, God Dave I’m _so fucking sorry_ ,”Jade pants, relenting his grip on one of Davey’s biceps to cup his hand along the sharp, stubbled angle of his jaw, and he holds their faces close, separated by the shyest breadth of space, hot with their combined breath. 

Davey has nothing to say to that so he just licks Jade’s mouth open with a wordless sound, mad with the fact their lips were almost touching,but not quite. Jade is pressing Davey so close to the wall with so much strength from his hips Davey has to stand on tiptoe, and he’s flickering on the edge of sure balance. Between kisses Jade says things that Davey needs to hear, things like _why aren’t we just?_ and _I can’t fucking stand this_ and _I am still so in love with you_. 

Jade’s voice is thready like raw silk, uneven and translucent in places. Davey lets his body become red and worked beneath Jade’s hands, his hair worried in all directions. The things Jade says are true, and he knows it, he wants to sob with how much he _knows_ it. They’re true. At least today, at least right now. Jade couldn’t _wait_ , not until Friday, not another second. He needs Davey that badly. _still_. 

He also knows they’ll hate each other again in a few days. Maybe even a few hours, if it’s bad week. Davey’s not sure yet, but it’s okay because he doesn’t have to be, not with Jade’s hard dick rubbing between his own legs, the fabric of their pants bunching and twisting together infernally as the chilly air whistles past them. Not with Jade’s spit on his chin and his own blood under Jade’s nails. Not with Jade mumbling, eyes closed and lids lying at peace, _this is the only thing I know anymore_ into the damp hollow beneath Davey’s left clavicle.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Davey and Jade were totally fighting when I saw their 2009 show at the Starland Ballroom. Davey even made an underhanded jab at Jade's penis size. I'm sure this is not the origin of that fight, because this is fiction. More of this. Never happened, don't own.

May 2009

Curled up into something less than a person, Davey stares as his floor, wondering why on earth he’s still doing this. There are the smallest, subtlest signs that Jade was here only hours ago, that fragile-soft time between five and six am, when the sun’s trying to rise and everything is wet outside. The last thing he said was, _I’ll be back soon. I’m worried about you._ And then he left, slipped out like he was never there at all, and now Davey’s stuck in a haunted house, eyes fixed upon and stinging at the faintest of ghosts and wondering _why? why still?_

If someone came to visit, they wouldn’t be able to tell that Davey and Jade, after ten years, were still fucking... There’s no indentation where Jade’s slight body laid. Nothing but hills and valleys of neon pink, silk sheets, unreal and vivid like some Dr. Seuss landscape. And Davey’s skin is unmarked, his hair could be mussed from only sleep. Jade is used to this, so he leaves no traces, and all he is now is the memory bleary and searing in Davey’s mind, a creased brow, concern, and his molasses slow voice saying _you’ve gotten too thin. You need to figure this shit out._

But Davey’s house is haunted. He feels it, the chill lifting those fine hairs on the back of his neck, floorboards creaking under the weight of some barely there step. There are hints of Jade everywhere. The smell of his leave in conditioner on the pillow they shared last night. One forgotten sock, black, ankle-high, and wadded into an insignificant shadow near the foot of Davey’s bed. The slightest smudge of brown on the white comforter from last night, when Davey took his index and middle finger out of Jade’s ass and wiped them on the bedspread carelessly before he spat into his palm, coated his hard dick, and fucked him for real. His green toothbrush, bristles flattened and frayed from harsh treatment, on the edge of the sink in a glass. 

Davey is so profoundly lonely, in a house empty save for Jade’s ghosts whispering in between the slats of his headboard. 

He’s not exactly sure when his obsession with becoming a ghost _himself_ arose. He feels like it’s always been there, dormant and quiet underneath his skin, this way, way back desire to disappear. After all, it somehow has to be related to his desire to die, and his desire to bleed. Throughout the whole of his history, Davey Havok has fashioned ways to deal with the fact he is a human, and has a heart that beats blood through a body made of something as vile and sullied a _flesh_. 

Destroying his exterior, draining his blood, screaming, writing poetry, fucking Jade. These are the things that have worked for him in the past. But lately, that gut-deep disgust at being in his own body has somehow been translated, through the existence of Jade’s ghosts, perhaps, as a desire to disappear. Figuratively, to be reduced to the words on the page. Literally, Davey resolves somehow that he needs to shrink. 

Starving himself is easy. He’s always been good at abstaining from things he loves; if one doesn’t learn to be good at it, then how can one wear scars with any sort of self respect? It has to be self-aware. It has to be an act of self-conscious self-slaughter, as everything in Davey’s life is, because then he can claim strength instead of weakness, and he will do _anything_ to remain in control of his own pain, his own recklessness, his own paradox. 

Davey, as he loses more and more weight and fascinates himself with the ever-increasing amount of days his body still runs on nothing, fuel free but _still standing_ , doesn’t think this is a problem. It’s too complex, too related to art-heroism to be something as base and spoiled and human as an _eating disorder_. Any time someone throws that word at him, these clinical bullshit terms like _anorexia nervosa, purging type_ and _exercise bulimia_ , they taste foreign in Davey’s hungry mouth, burn unwelcome in his empty stomach. He wants to lift his head, exhausted and wobbling on his reedy neck, and explain _no, no it’s not like that. I’m not vain, I’m_ God. _I don’t want to be thin, I want to be_ nothing. _If I can’t be everything, then I_ must _be nothing. Don’t you understand?_

But of course, no one does. They just see his ever dwindling frame, the bones jutting in harsh relief, things pulsing subtly underneath like a science project. They just see his overwhelming gym schedule, they see him living off of lattes, they see him counting calories and his hair falling out in handfuls. It looks like anorexia, not art. But Davey knows the truth, he knows that he’s not sick, he’s just a ghost, and ghosts don’t need to eat.

Like Kafka’s Hunger Artist, if he saw the point in feeding his body when his pathetic, loathsome heart refused to stop beating even when it was starved...then maybe he’d eat. 

But that’s not the case. This may be the first thing about him Jade doesn’t seem to understand, and that both pleases and scares Davey. He’s thrilled every time he opens the door and Jade is newly stunned by the bones he can see, scared and thin-lipped with worry. Davey loves the way Jade touches him like he’s frail, like he might break. It makes it easier for Davey to flip him over and fuck his acquiescent body into the mattress, even though for the first time since high school, he’s smaller than Jade. But even as a ghost, he’s stronger. He’ll always be. 

It’s all about strength. And _proof._

He needs to prove that he can be smaller than Jade. He needs to prove that even if he was nothing but _bones,_ Jade wouldn’t be able to quit. That Jade would love him even if he were a skeleton. If he were _nothing._ It’s not just his flesh that Jade loves, it’s _everything_. It’s his art, his soul, his essence. That’s what ties them together, the wire that runs through more than their flesh that Jade cannot sever, no matter how desperately he tries. Davey needs to prove this to Jade, to himself. So he shrinks. 

And as Davey lays starving in his bed listening to memories tread on and creak the floorboards, hanging onto the faintest smell of Jade’s skin, he resolves to wait another hour before a handful of frozen peas. After all, what’s one more hour? His body can do it. His body can give until he’s nothing but words. He’s done it before. When he was king, he gave _everything_ to the subjects of Decemberundergound, and they took it. They’re still taking, and they’ll keep taking. They took Jade away from him, they took his body, and they took his words. 

Now, all that’s left is hunger, cipher, and 1/16th of this thing Jade used to love. But Davey wants to be nothing. Nothing but his art, a ghost that floats through Jade’s apartment and shuts his doors without asking, haunting him day in and day out and making him still wonder, _why?_

Jade leaves sometime around dawn, and when he says in a harsh whisper _I’ll be back soon. I’m worried about you,_ Davey wishes he wasn’t so tired, otherwise he would like to feel the feather-light feeling of triumph in proving that even though he is nothing but bones, Jade still loves him. _You would love a smear of blood on a page, Jade. You would love ash._ He wants to say, but he’s too weak to open his mouth.

~*~

September 2009

Davey is backstage at the Starland Ballroom, furious as he ties and reties his shoes, fingers absently scraping along the one row of sequins that’s beginning to unravel. He digs his teeth into his lower lip, cursing quietly to himself. No one has talked to him for a few hours unless it’s an impersonal “on in two hours” or “have you seen my earplugs?” They can all sense that Davey’s existing in a dark fold of his mind, and that he’s in danger of flying off the handle and snapping at any one of them. Namely Jade. 

It bothers Davey that no one is talking to him. But it would bother him if they did, too. So the whole thing is futile. Just as it is futile to replay years-old memories and seethe over them, just as it is futile to hate Jade for something that happened so long ago, something unchangeable. But Davey can’t stop himself, so he tightens the knot of his laces with a childish force, takes a deep breath, and reminds himself that he’ll be onstage in a matter of minutes, and everyone will worship him, and he’ll scream so hard the back of his throat will taste metallic, prickled with flecks of blood. 

Jade didn’t even do anything tonight. It was there when Davey woke up crumpled next to him in their hotel bed, skin sticking together with last night’s come and sweat. It was coiled insidiously in this gut, the familiar weight of hatred like a clenched fist, knuckles digging through heaps of intestine as his eyes fall on Jade. There are days, even now, when he looks at Jade in his bed and thinks _you left. You left. You left._ Then, _this is what I’ve been writing about? This is what I’ve nearly destroyed myself over? This is the scab I keep picking at? This is the you in half my songs? The you, the love, the darling. This._

Some days, Davey realizes that Jade is old, and somehow both swollen and thin. Not even attractive anymore. On some days. They are in New Jersey so there’s shit around them for miles, a faint garbage smell and gas you’re not allowed to pump yourself, so Davey feels especially self-righteous when he wakes Jade up and kicks him out. _I need a few hours to myself_ is what he tells him, and Jade has to know from years of this game that Davey’s really saying _I can’t stand to look at you right now._

And he sends him out into Saryeville, to fend for his own skinny ass in all that trash while Davey imagines a night like tonight, when everyone will love him and bodies will pile against the barricade sobbing his name. And he’ll be alone, truly alone, sunk deep like a tick into his own alone, feeding off the blood of this imagined love, the love of all these kids in their separate universes.

Davey’s safe there. But as he stands in the corner and does his vocal exercises, gargling green tea and belting scales, he knows that as much as he’s pissed off at being ignored, at Jade, at everything, at the core of every malignant strain of fury, is hating himself. Some things never change. All of this, every ounce of it would be tolerable if Davey was in control, if Davey knew how to steal himself away into that far-away, singing satellite-love of screaming kids and nothing else, if he could revel in his aloneness like he used to, before he became this disillusioned heap of steaming metal. 

But he can’t do that. It’s based in art, so it’s only temporarily absolute. But Jade, even when he’s not attractive and just a man and just a mistake, is everything. 

The way Davey sees it, there is the ideal, and there is the reality. 

Try as he might, Davey cannot make himself stay forever untouched and undissapointed, imagining the ideal love with all its shimmering sugar-tower sides and melted pearls, safe and sound and wrapped in swaddling. Ask him anything, _anything,_ any perfect scenario, and he will choose the reality. No matter how flawed, no matter how disappointing, no matter how swollen and thin and ancient and Jade. 

He’s not sure what this says about him. If it means he’s desperate. Pathetic. A shade of the romantic he wishes he was. Or, if it means the opposite and he’s an artist, forever attempting to perfect an imperfect craft at the cost of his own intactness. He loves whatever will break his heart, and as much as he wants to believe that it’s the imagined version, the far away, the isolation and the distance and Decemberunderground, it’s _not._ It’s Jade. 

There’s the ideal, and there’s the reality. 

The ideal is that Davey is a hero of art and a hero of love, self-sabotaging for the greater good, a Promethean Prophet bringing his scripture to lost kids looking for anything to save them. In this world, Davey gives up his dignity for the sake of love, he dies for love, silently in this world of cryptic lyrics. He’s such a hero he doesn’t even get to revel in the glory t for all his years of martyrdom and suffering. He’s pure and empty, an ascetic. He’s a hunger artist, he doesn’t need food because he can live off of art and this wedding-sheet blown through with holes and holes, this shredded love. He’s the pillar of strength and he can withstand any amount of pain, physical pain by his own hand and the pain of loving Jade, who, in this version, is what ruined everything. In the ideal version, Jade is none of these things, not a hero, not an artist, just a coward and an indulgent. And Davey is the one who saves them both, by loving whatever breaks his heart. 

The reality is that Davey is an old man. A wretched human, thirty five years old and one hundred and thirty six pounds. He dies for love not at the cross, not for anyone’s salvation, not even for art. He dies for love because he knows nothing better, because he’s wretchedly human and animal and selfish. He’s not bones, he’s anorexic. He’s not so strong he can take any amount of pain, he’s so weak he doesn’t know how to live without it. He’s so weak he can’t stand to breathe without pain and the way it dilutes the septic mess inside, the lonely blood-sucked hollows left from the leeches of loving Jade. He needs all the attention and affection in the world to fill these voids and still, it’s not enough. He’s an old man who still makes himself bleed, who can’t eat, and keeps coming back and hiding inside this other old man, just so he can look at someone else’s scars for once. 

He knows all of these things, knows them as a part of his own map of tattoos. He knows which is real, and which is illusion, even on the days he’s baked sweet and blistering inside the cocoon of his own self righteousness. 

Coughing over the constriction of a sore throat, Davey screams once from his diaphragm, just to get the feeling out. The poison that’s been welling in his gut and turning his body into a cavity of acrid, the years and years of being a hero. Of being a martyr, of loving without bounds or discretion, and killing himself day by painstaking, ice-cold day. It’s easy to make animal sounds of undiluted misery when you’re a vocalist. No one turns to look at him, to see if he’s bleeding out from his throat cords, if he’s throwing up. They all just keep stretching, chit-chatting, lying, breathing in and out like it’s an easy thing to do. 

And with water in his eyes and gore in his mouth, Davey swallows the old penny taste, rolls his shoulders, and thinks of all the imagined and untarnished wonders he’s ruined by his necessity to die. 

Still, if you asked him, if you asked him and gave him the choice, Davey would _always_ choose the reality. 

~*~

April, 2008

For a something as fleeting as a moment, Davey forgets everything. Who he is, who he used to be, his mission, his dreams, the labyrinth he built to explain his pain away with all its tunnels and dead ends. He forgets all of these things when he gets what he’s been wanting. When Jade comes back (and not even for _good,_ just this one time, just with the _pause before the inhalation_ it would take him to say, _I told her_ and _I’m staying.)_ Jade is here, in his home, at least for now, and because Davey has never known how to enact discretion, he throws himself into it and drowns all over again. 

They don’t leave Davey’s house for a few days, except to venture to the CVS on Fountain where they stock up like children on discount holiday candy. It’s the week after Easter Sunday, and the city decided that spring was over and launched itself into what felt like July. So with bags of robins eggs and gummy rabbits and Cruzers pizza every night, Davey and Jade hide from the waves of nauseating heat that rise and flicker off of the streets by staying inside, making forts, and keep the air conditioning on. Forgetting things. 

It’s like being seven again. Or, it’s like 1999 again. When Davey was seven he still had to go to bed at eight, and it was one piece of candy after dinner, not the entire bag. Because he is an adult now, and an adult without discretion no less, he’s allowed to do whatever the fuck he wants. 

Davey feels dangerous, like he might die at any second for some reason (stranger things have happened, Jade _told her_ after all), so he lets go of the usual rules and barriers he stacks around himself, and just _consumes._ If a motor bus crashes into them tomorrow, he wants to die by Jade’s side, drinking from him totally, recklessly. Not holding back and counting calories and trying to prove some point. 

It’s womblike in his apartment, quiet and amniotic. They talk without words. They stay every night until morning comes and watch the sun rise together from Davey’s window seat, eating dark chocolate and graham crackers off of the same plate. They sleep late, awaking again at dusk when it’s already started to cool off, and Los Angeles smells sweet like tar and things frying and the roses from gardens on Los Feliz. 

Davey stops counting calories for three days and doesn’t even miss adding up the serving sizes and totaling the careful numbers. He fucks Jade sometimes more than twice a day, but never less, not caring if he hurts him. He takes him when he wants him, and every time Jade lets him do it. Every time Jade gets hard, comes, like he’s a kid again and Davey does it every time because he _wants to_ , because he _can’t get enough_ , not just because he’s desperately trying to prove a point. 

He’s not sure of his point anymore though, because he doesn’t remember anything clearly right now. Not even why he hates Jade more than he loves him, these days. He’s beginning to wonder why he starves himself, why he has such bad insomnia...but also why he eats, why he bothers to sleep at all. Because when Jade’s here, (though he can eat and sleep so easily it stuns him) he doesn’t really need anything else. He could live off of this, this person,and this person _alone_. Davey forgets everything else but this, and believes it, for three whole days. 

Three days of sleep and junk food and sex is an eternity when you’re Davey Havok. So it seems amazing, unswalloable. A shard of hope glittering between the metal and cement of a city Davey hates, but half-way lives in because he thinks it’s important to be uncomfortable most of the time, because LA becomes a clam around a grain of sand that is Davey, and what he writes, the miracle pearl. 

Of course, at four sixteen PM on the fourth day, Davey wakes up sticky with a film of last nights sweat and come, his chest pressed to Jade’s spine like they were meant to be resewn along those hems, he remembers _everything_. It all comes crashing down on him with an unimaginable weight, and he can’t breathe. Kicking Jade’s legs from his own, he struggles out of bed, ignoring the sleepy sighs and wordless murmuring that try to drag him back there. 

And so suddenly, Davey is choking, choking on all the candy he’s eaten, all the come and spit he’s swallowed. He throws up before he even makes it to the toilet, a technicolor splatter of chewed up lemon-yellow and cherry -red and lime-green all over his white tile, flecks of it staining his feet, his shirt. It almost looks pretty there, all the fruit-loops and sour patch kids, if it weren’t for the mess of brown the color is floating in. Everything is mixed together, indistinguishable like a labyrinth and too many tunnels. And Davey remembers _everything_.

He curls up there, on his side between the door and the sink with his cheek pressed to cool tile, and gags up frothy mouthfuls of bile and soda. His eyes closed and skin tinted green, he thinks about Jade in the next room. Jade who will eventually go home, to her, and his dog, and his flower boxes. Jade, who left once, and will leave again and again. 

Jade stumbles in a few minutes later, dropping to his knees next to Davey and placing a hand gingerly on his clammy cheek, thumb aligned at the corner of his mouth, chapped and burning with acid. “Dave,” he says clearly, “what happened, do you need me to call a doctor?” There’s the edge of panic to his voice, and that makes Davey distantly sorrowful. He imagines Jade’s face, boyish and aging all at once, the bags beneath his eyes and the soft, rounded cheeks. 

“No, no, I’m fine,” Davey says. He clears his throat, and he _sounds_ fine, just dizzy. Tired. He doesn’t know what happened...too much discount Easter candy, too much sleep, to much seed and sugar. 

Too much of a good thing.   
“I just need you,” Davey says wearily, shamed because it’s the truth, and shamed because it’s an impossible thing to ask for from Jade. 

_I just need you to leave_ would have been a better thing to say, but Davey’s weak today. He’s only just remembered. 

Once he stops seeing stars and Jade gives him some water from a bendy straw, he rises on shaky legs and cleans up his own vomit, gagging the occasional mouthful of thick, color streaked spit into the toilet when his hand feels the warmth of something that used to be in his stomach through the paper towels. He thinks his stomach must not be used to so much food. By the time the sun has set, Jade’s left again, promising to visit soon and to send more Blaqkaudio tracks in his next email, but leaving all the same. 

With the way Jade tears out of his driveway, leaving thin, smoking snakes of rubber on the asphalt, Davey thinks that he must have remembered everything, too.


	4. Chapter 4

July 2009

They choose remote places to fuck, because they aren’t haunted by memories, nor will they accidentally run into anyone they know. It’s safe, and discreet. No one recognizes them in Oakhurst, or Thousand Oaks, or Canoga Park. In these places Davey can’t help but feel like someone’s hired whore, renting cheap motel rooms with private credit cards with his hood up and sunglasses on. He puts the room under _Ian,_ because he’s always liked the name and he’s loved lots of Ians, and Jade will know that’s him. 

This time it’s Bakersfield. Davey’s driven through Bakersfield countless times, they’ve even played more than a few shows here. It’s an utter shithole, full of notoriously cheap fast food chains and industrial buildings, old folks homes and convalescent hospitals. It’s where people go to die. 

Davey remembers someone telling him once that because living costs were so low, people without stable incomes moved to Bakersfield, people who were laid off, on disability or unemployment. As he drives down Buck Owens Dr., or gets a bean burrito at Del Taco with a distinct self-disgust and the knowledge that he’ll make himself throw it up later with the stem of his toothbrush, Davey notices all the broken people. People with limps, with wheel chairs, on crutches, chronic coughs, arms in slings. 

The guy who gives him his motel room key is missing three fingers, still bandaged with stiff, lymph stained gauze trying to hide some work related injury. Davey thanks him and takes the key, hardly noticing because he’s busy thinking about two minutes from now, when he’ll be alone and he can take his toothbrush and slide it down his own throat, beans and lazily chewed tortilla swirling down the sink while he brushes his teeth, placidly empty again. 

Eyes stinging, he waits for Jade, perched near the pillows, the cigarette-burned bedspread on the King-Sized mattress itchy beneath his wandering hands. It’s an ugly thing, brown and blue floral print, as if flowers are actually brown and blue. It reminds him of his grandmother’s collection of delph china, the one he wasn’t allowed to touch. His hand flies to his lap, eyes flitting shut because he keeps accidentally thinking about broken people, people who came to Bakersfield to die. Out to pasture, stuck in malfunctioning bodies, resigned. 

Davey knows that nothing has changed. It’s the same old bullshit. He and Jade are still as in love as they were in 1999. He and Jade still hate each other as much as they did in 2006. It’s 2009, and Davey’s still lonely and self-hating on some days, convinced he’s the second coming on others. Jade still has his house and his dog and _her_ , and they have their contractual accord, where he pays for her schooling and her trips, she’s his girlfriend and his porch and his stability, and they just don’t _talk_ about Davey, or the weekend trips to Oakland. To Bakersfield. 

It’s the same old bullshit. He exists as both extremes, a fiction, while the reality rests somewhere between the two and Jade pretends he knows where. Davey supposes that this is the way it’ll be for the rest of his life. Some days, he wants to end that life _right now._ Other days, most days, he’s okay with the way things are, and the way they will be. Resigned.

Anyway, this was his choice, and he knew it was stupid to begin with, even in 1999. In 2000, Davey warned Jade all those years ago, but he warned himself, too. He was the one who climbed onto Jade’s chest the morning after they first kissed and said, _this is so stupid. we’re going to die, do you realize that?_

And they did. Both of them. They were just too stupid to stop, to think about it or understand. So whenever Davey feels like he might kill Jade, kill himself, kill _something_ , he remembers that this was his own choice, his own creation, his own mess. And he dug himself the grave and crawled inside of it, this creaky, exhausted mattress in a motel 6 in Bakersfield. And that’s the way it is. There were a few brilliant years before things started to fall apart, but Davey’s resigned to the way things are now. Broken, and waiting to die. 

After Jade arrives, they kiss pressed against the armoire that holds the TV and a chest of drawers with a copy of the bible in the topmost one, and fuck on the bed for a minute before they fall off, and finish the job on the carpet between the cheap circular table and the armchair. Jade gets rug-burn on his knees and elbows, and they have a good laugh about that, and the chewing gum adhered to the bottom of the tabletop for awhile once they finish, sprawled sweating on their backs with legs entwined in a hopeless filigree. The sex chemicals haven’t faded from Davey’s system yet, so right now, he feels like it might all be worth it. That this was his choice, certainly, and it was the right one. 

Before that feeling leaves and they’re left broken and waiting to die in Bakersfield, he rolls over onto his stomach, close to Jade so their foreheads are nearly touching. Jade’s hair, dyed chestnut to hide the new grey strands that run through the fringe in front, has fallen away in chaos from his face, and Davey can see both of his eyes. They’re impossibly wide, and he it makes his throat tighten, so he chases the feeling away by kissing each lid closed. 

“How’re you?” Jade asks hoarsely with Davey’s mouth at his brow. He asks this because they haven’t spoken yet, not anything past _fuck me now_ and _I don’t care_ and each other’s names one thousand times over. 

Davey thinks for a moment, threading his hand through that secretly grey part of Jade’s hair and digging his knee into the narrow muscle of Jade’s naked, splayed thigh. “Resigned,” he says eventually, thinking that it is exactly the right word, exactly what he means. 

Jade makes a sound between a cough and a laugh, extending his neck to he can press his lips to the tender, inked inside of Davey’s wrist. His eyes slide shut and Davey watches him, moved, silenced, taken. 

They’re quiet together for a moment, hearts beating in almost-tandem. Then a far away grumbling of thunder startles them both closer. “Is is raining?” Jade asks in a whisper, but the sky answers him as the lonely, approaching-train sound gives way to full blown wails, the crash of rain, and and the room is illuminated by lightening. 

Davey and Jade look at each other then scramble to their feet. It rarely rains in California, let alone in the summer. Davey remembers every summer rain with stark, flash-bulb clarity, and he wants this one to be no different, so he throws his clothes on and tears out the door, thinking, _this is the rain coming to the Wasteland,_ and _we did it. In hell for us a heaven._

The earth shakes with the force of the thunder, rolling and tumbling and colliding, and Jade wipes a trail of crusting seed from his thighs before stepping into his jeans. Then he’s following Davey, and they’re stumbling down the hall barefoot, bursting out the closest exit to see the storm. 

And it’s raining, horizontal and furious, with a white sky behind it. In hell for us a heaven. The thunder keeps rumbling even when it’s not crashing, and they stand there for a long time, water collecting in their hair and lashes. Jade’s long, spindly index finger sidles it’s way into Davey’s wet palm without Davey noticing, because he is to lost in the way it’s raining, so glad for something to mix with the tears he’s been holding back all day, sick of feeling too much. 

~*~

August 2008

Hollywood isn’s a real place. After all it’s filled with folks who grew up elsewhere, midwestern queer kids looking desperately for somewhere they won’t get tied to the back of a pickup truck and dragged through town. Wannabe actors and screen writers all serving coffee and busing tables. Just ask anyone, so where are you from? No one will say LA. It’ll be some other place, a real place, and they’ll tell you where they came from, who they are, who they’re trying to be, and then ask if you want to read their screenplay. 

Davey always politely declines. He’s not really interested in reading these kids Hollywood-friendly account of their own problems. Everyone in Hollywood has some dark secret, some well fashioned persona, some more interesting, more beautiful, more troubled version of themselves. Everyone’s a teledrama here. If Davey were to read the screenplays, he’d have the same shit to say about every one: Get some real problems, kid. Your are parents alcoholics? They sent you to private school? You got thrown in dumpsters in the 4th grade? Locked in the broom closet? Raped by your uncle? The priest? The dog? 

You and every other dyed-blonde, tan-oiled kid here with a screenplay and an audition tomorrow at eleven forty five. If you really want to get famous, acquire some real problems and write about them. Get kidnapped by terrorists, sold into sexual slavery. Pay ten dollars for some black market plastic surgery that goes horribly wrong. Write about being disfigured. Or better yet, admit you _have_ no real problems and write about _that_. He wants to tell them, between sipping his coffee and finding an ant floating on the surface of it a tiny, rainbow oil slick, _it worked for me. That’s how I got rich, got famous. Be honest, and write the truth. You’re miserable, despairing, want to die. And why? No reason. Because you exist, because you have a body._

Every single song Davey Havok has written about despair didn’t _have_ an outside source, just his own twisted insides, his own intestines, his own stupid beating heart. He has no true source of despair, just as this story has no plot. He should tell all these waitresses and bell hops, _Just go insane. Bitch about the most boring, the most mundane, the most revoltingly human. That you’re lonely. It worked for me. Everyone will relate to it, because everyone has the same complete and utter lack of real problems. It’ll make you you rich. And Famous. Just ask me._

After all, the biggest tragedy about these kids is that they’re living in Hollywood cleaning eggs and syrup and catsup off of cracked plates to pay the rent for their shithole lofts, thinking they’re going to hit it big because some liar once told them they were talented and their parents were alcoholics. 

The best thing that ever happened to Davey was realizing he wasn’t special. That every single misery came from inside of him, (unless you counted the couple hundred that came from Jade, but Jade was more of an internal source than an external one, if you ask Davey about the nature of their connection.) That specialness was something he could create, a costume he could fashion around himself so when he looked in a mirror, and when other people looked at him, they could see it. Just a trick of the light, not real magic. Davey’s too old, too bitter to ever imagine he could create real magic. 

Because Davey’s rich and famous, he could leave these screenplay kids a generous tip. But he doesn’t. He can’t stand how self pitying and self-absorbed they are, without realizing they’re self-absorbed. Arrogance is a perfectly admirable trait, if it’s a conscious act of deceit. Otherwise, it’s just unwitting, immature, self-righteous self-absorption. Davey won’t shell out an extra few bucks for that. Especially when there’s an ant in his coffee. 

He wads up an average sized tip, deposits it in a crumple next to the receipt, then leaves the diner for the hotel, unsure of what time it is. 

Summer in Hollywood has to be as close to hell as Davey’s ever felt. It’s positively infernal. For one thing, you have the heat, beating down and baking everyone who walks there, creating this oven of spay tanned things all milling around on Melrose, stick-arms weighed down with shopping bags and hand bags and other kinds of bags. Everything’s just waiting to die in the summer, like trees swollen with fruit in apprehension for the fall, when things are _actually_ dying, instead of being stuck in this stagnant season in this stagnant place. So many people waiting, and sweating. 

Davey doesn’t like to sweat. In fact, the only things he really doesn’t mind coming from his body are blood and come, and sometimes those don’t even work for him. He doesn’t need to be reminded that when stripped of all his poetry, his self-constructed specialness, he bleeds like everyone else. He’s built to reproduce, like everyone else. Who the fuck cares if it feels good? 

He sweats, just like everyone else, these rivers of salt and water that trail down his spine, make his Placebo shirt stick to him beneath his arms, at the small of his back. He’s nearly drenched by the time he makes it back to their hotel, riding the elevator up to the third floor, holding his sunglasses in one wet hand and kneading the decidedly wet space between his eyes, the indentations on the bridge of his nose. 

Throwing the door to their room open, he finds Jade half-naked even though the air conditioning is blasting, a pen between his crooked teeth and a notebook in explosive disarray on his lap. 

“I _fucking loathe_ Hollywood,” Davey spits, dropping his own handbag on the ground and slamming the door. Jade looks up, a little fearful, still gnawing on his pen cap. 

“You want to take a weekend trip to Joshua Tree? Get away from the heat?” He offers, because he knows that Davey will decline. Davey doesn’t allow _fun things_ when they’re working. They’re not young enough for spontaneous trips, not _together_ enough for romance. 

“Of course not,” He snaps. He’s quietly pleased that Jade tried, however, because Joshua Tree is somewhere he’d go with _her_ , somewhere he’s _gone_ with her. It makes Davey perversely thrilled that it’s not special to Jade, that it’s not a location reserved for him and her. That he’d take Davey there, too. Specialness is an illusion, anyway. Every place, every person is exactly the fucking same, and he knows Jade knows this too, but it’s good to be reminded. 

“Come sit down then. I got stuff to show you, I think I narrowed it down to ten. Tell me what you think,” Jade holds up the notebook, his narrow white chest more freckled than it was even a couple of days ago. He has a farmer’s tan and that pleases Davey, too. 

Davey takes a deep breath, and comes to sit on the couch in their suite. Jade starts talking, pointing at indecipherable stuff on the page with his spit-wet pen, a mess of his own handwriting that Davey used to want tattooed on his body. But Davey can’t focus for some reason, and interrupts him after a moment of attempted and failed listening. 

“It’s definitely not London. I’ve only been there a few times, but I’m fairly certain that it’s not London, and it’s here. LA. Fucking _Hollywood,_ ” Davey interjects, hand alighting itself on Jade’s forearm. “The Wasteland, I mean.”

Jade stops talking and stares at Davey for a moment, pretending he doesn’t know what he’s talking about, but only _pretending_. He shuts the notebook on his lap, stilling and shifting to face Davey, who doesn’t wait for him to give permission and continues. “There’s not single real person here.” 

“...Dave...” Jade looks down, impossibly long finger fidgeting along the tightly wound aluminum spiral in the notebook. “Where are you going with this. I thought you hated _The Wasteland._ ” 

“Didn’t I just say that I hated Hollywood?” Davey urges, seeing himself in the wide, glassy surface of Jade’s right eye. His reflection, though small, startles him because it’s how he really looks. A man with a scruffy, dark beard, lines around his eyes, an empty hole through his lip like a scar from a fishhook. Nothing special, stripped of all his poetry and tired of glitter and masks. Just like every other single person in the word, in Hollywood. 

“You did,” Jade assures him, closing his eyes so Davey has to stop looking at himself. 

“We’re just animals in a zoo. Everyone watching us, wanting a savior to deliver them from their stupid fucking petty ass problems. There is _so much_ empty connection around us Jade, so many mechanized people having bad sex,” his voice is wild and emphatic, while Jade sits there silently, shirtless, his head thrown back, eyes closed and twitching. Davey goes on. “No one here understands the difference between synthesized connection, and _synthetic_ connection. They think that if they just _come_ to Hollywood, make a webpage, write a screenplay, whatever...that they’ll just get famous or be happy or something. But every connection they make is synthetic. Because they’re not putting the work or the honesty into their art to actually _synthesize it._ ” 

They’re both quiet, the air conditioning humming and some couple fighting in Spanish two rooms over. There are always people fighting in Spanish here, fighting in Spanish and Mandarin and Korean and poor English. Davey is on the edge of the couch, looking desperately at Jade’s chest rise and fall. 

“Are you listening to me?” 

“Yes. Keep going.” Jade’s eyelashes flicker against the curve of his cheek. 

“Hollywood is a wasteland, of all these blind, speechless people hurtling around stupidly waiting for someone to save them, or waiting to fall in love, or some bullshit. But it’s not going to happen because none of it’s real and they’re just going to crash. We’re watching a whole city full of car crashes from his pedestal, because they’ve put is up here.” He’s breathless, but Jade is listening to every word. 

Eventually Jade says: “Yeah, but you asked for that. You asked to be God, Dave, you know that.” 

Ignoring him, he trudges on. “This place is built on being artificial. This generation is built on being artificial, you know? And I was _so fucking dumb_ to believe that I could be the king of a future where I wasn’t alone, and that being famous or successful would mean I was happy. or understood. Or loved. I thought the fact you understood me, and understood the hollowness of connection, that it would cancel out that void. But even if you synthesize connection, there’s no guarantee--” Davey’s voice cracks, and before he knows it he’s been reduced to vulnerability, choking on dry tears that swell his throat closed. He gasps, rubbing his face with his palm and staring at the ceiling, hating, _hating_ that he still feels so much. 

Jade finally opens his eyes. “Dave. I think you’re right about a lot of this, but you take it too far.” 

“I _always_ take it too far,” Davey says miserably, noticing that his legs are shaking, that he’s sweating again despite the air conditioning. Every fucking thing he’s ever said is being recorded, and he was too honest, too exposed, and now he’s just bones, just a smear of blood on a page, a ghost. 

“You know what you’re wrong about though?” Jade says gently, setting the notebooks on the floor in front of him and turning to face Davey full on, all of him tense with sincerity. 

“What.” 

“That there’s not a single real person here.” 

“Jade, you should have _seen_ the girl who waited on me today, she was _so sad,_ another one of those screenplay--”

“You and me.” 

Davey blinks, and blinks, and blinks again. Everything from the neck up hurts, and he wants so badly to protest, say _but I don’t want to be real anymore. I don’t want to feel, or understand, or be alive. I just want to go to sleep. It’s too much. You’re too much._ He can’t talk though, so he blinks, and blinks. 

“Dave, you’re right. Hollywood is one big fucking Wasteland. Hell, the world is one big fucking wasteland. But you and I are real, and we’re here, together, creating. Synthesizing connection, whatever you called it. And I know there’s a whole well of history and bullshit you don’t want to think about, and that you hate me a lot of the time, but I _do understand_. Now take a deep breath.” 

Davey inhales, counts to ten. Then Jade reaches out and cards and hand through his hair, bringing their faces closer together, so they can feel one another’s breath on their lips. Davey resists, but only for a second. 

“But there’s _so much dead land_ ,” he says quietly, though the bitterness has left his voice. 

“And then there’s Joshua Tree,” Jade says hopefully. He puts his hand through Davey’s hair, roughly. Again. Finally, Davey laughs a little, pushes his hand away. 

“You’re going to fuck up my hair,” he rasps, but he lets Jade do it again, he lets Jade put his hands under his shirt and scratch down his back hard enough his nails come back with little bits of white skin rolled up underneath them. He lets Jade bite him on the shoulder, and bruise his ribs, and hurt him, ground him, brand him, while the world bakes outside and waits to die. And Davey thinks, _in hell for us a heaven_ , but only half-believes himself this time. But still, he resigns himself to that, and the blood Jade draws to the surface on either side of his spinal cord.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My thoughts on Davey's gayness or lack thereof. Creatures of night, brought to light!

June 2010

Davey is definitely not gay, and that’s never particularly sat right with him. Especially not now, when he’s standing on a street corner in West Hollywood, pink suit jacket folded in his arms and a parade of catcalls following him while he paces, waiting. Because he has a dick and he’s standing in West Hollywood with something pink on his body, everyone’s decided he’s gay. Some day a long time ago, (before he really got the nuance of confusion and assumption and how he liked one, but not the other) Davey might have thrived and preened in such attention. It’s not that he wants to be _gay_ , though, not really. He’s sure that if he were gay, he’d get bored with that, too. 

The issue with Davey is that he’s always wanted to be _everything_ while also managing to be _nothing_ , this big glaring question mark so when he tears through people’s line of vision, what’s left in the wake of the cyclone is a bunch of slack jawed faces asking _what?_ or, _Is he or isn’t he? Is he even a he, or..._

This goes along with one hundred other impossibilities Davey’s been chasing for the whole of his existence. To be loved by everyone yet understood by no one, to be just out of reach but touched in the place between his ribs that _counts_ by one person whose touch _counts_. To be male and female, to be neither. To be David Bowie, and Morrissey, and an homage to both but better than either. To be more than human. 

The constraints of sexuality, whether gay or straight and especially _bisexual_ , that stupid fucking word that ceased its gaze at _two_ , limit Davey’s forever predilection for the alien. If he’s straight, he’s like the self proclaimed 80 percent of the population. If he’s gay, he’s like all of West Hollywood. Either way, people make assumptions, and either way, the confusion he craves is lost to humanity’s necessity to cut and cut and label and sterilize and study. 

Still, at least gay people were a minority, a counter culture. At least when people think Davey’s gay, they categorize him with humans who intentionally or unintentionally made a statement, rather than ones who just breed children. He’d rather they assume he’s gay, if they’re going to make him victim of assumption. 

When it comes down to it though, Davey’s nothing like these guys on Santa Monica Blvd. He isn’t even half-gay, not even a third, maybe. Try as he might to swish when walked, hold his hands and wrists at the perfect angle, lisp when appropriate, look the part, and surround himself with the flesh of boys from Orange County... when it comes down to the act of sex, he just straight up prefers women. It’s infuriating. 

Of course, Jade is the exception. 

And what an exception he is. It’s perfectly, bitterly ironic that Davey wishes he was mostly gay, is stuck being mostly straight, but is perpetually in love with a man. And gets no fucking credit for it. 

At this moment in the dusky evening between San Vicente and Santa Monica, he feels like a tourist, even though a younger version of himself spent a lot of time haunting West Hollywood dance clubs. A tourist and an impostor, some straight, white, rich dude too spoiled to handle the fact he wasn’t born oppressed, utilizing something as cheap as sex to pose as a threat to normalcy. 

Davey is painfully, revoltingly normal, and he wonders why on earth Jade could ever develop a void that yearned to be filled with a landscape as bleak as normalcy. 

Because it’s Saturday, guys are dancing at the clubs and tripping up and down the street drunk and shirtless, eyes unfocused as they fall on Davey in his suit slacks and sequined tennis shoes. He’s just made an appearance at his friend’s show at the Troubador, and somehow Jade heard he’d be in LA and insisted they meet for dinner. 

Davey keeps on remembering the fierce, concealed sound of desperation under Jade’s usual flat tone of voice, the need belying that this was probably more than just dinner. Even if they didn’t find time or a place to fuck, it would be more than dinner, because he could tell from the mere _undercurrent_ of Jade’s voice that he didn’t want to see Davey, he _needed_ to see Davey. Needed anything from him, even two hours to talk at a smoothie place where their knees would bump under the table and that was it. 

As Davey’s waiting for her to drop him off, guys keep assuming. Keep grouping him in with themselves, projecting their want onto his pink suit jacket and glittery chucks. Guys of all sizes, guys with V neck shirts and waxed chests, frosted tips and designer shoes. Some are walking little chihuahuas or yorkies, some are comically buff. There’s one on roller skates. Sometimes they come in pairs, holding hands or linking arms but still, letting their eyes crawl over Davey’s body and purring, “hey there sexy, you need a ride home?” 

No, he doesn’t need a ride home, but thank you. No, he doesn’t want to get drinks at the Abbey. No, he doesn’t get paid to stand there and look handsome. No, he’s not interested in a good time tonight. No, he doesn’t have a boyfriend, but no, he doesn’t _want one_. 

It’s at that moment his cell phone buzzes in his pocket, and he jumps, hand jerking to pull it out. 

“Dave we’re on our way, where are you?” Jade mumbles. 

“We?” 

“Dave, I _told you_ \--”

“I know, it’s fine,” he snaps curtly, thumbing a seam along his waistband. Guys are walking by and looking at him, guys with strong jaws and spray tans and white bermuda shorts. He starts walking just so he blends in with their mess, so he stops being a fixture on the sidewalk like a street lamp or something, this place for dogs to piss and guys to catcall. “I’m on Santa Monica, walking towards that big Starbucks on the corner.” 

“Okay, see you in five.” 

Davey hangs up but keeps the phone pressed to his ear as he passes The Cantina, where shirtless, sweaty guys hang over the cheesy bamboo railing. They’re all holding drinks the color of Jolly Ranchers, apple green and blue raspberry and watermelon. The hokey tiki-lights flicker and radiate a sickly, too-wet heat for Los Angeles, and there’s rainbow mardigras beads threaded through the thatch canopy. 

“Nice suit, sweet heart. Where you going all dolled up like that?” some guy slurs. “Aren’t you hot in that thing? You want someone to take that off for you?” A chorus of laughs follow the offer, and Davey is pretty sure none of them seriously want to fuck him. It’s homosocial bonding, something guys do in front of other guys, their buddies, to seem cool. It’s the same deal as when a guy honks at some girl on the street. He’s not doing it because he expects she’ll turn around and give him her number, but so his friend will know he’s straight, so he’ll be accepted as a part of the pack. 

Davey is nothing but a girl walking down the street in short shorts getting honked at by dudes in trucks. It’s just a different neighborhood, but he’s still a tourist. He smacks his lips at them anyway, flashes his smile that he _knows_ gets people’s attention and says, “not tonight, boys. I’m meeting my date.” 

And one of them sighs, “how come all the beautiful men have girlfriends?” And Davey bites the inside of his cheek at another half-truth, another assumption. Raking his hand through his hair, he quickens his pace to separate himself from the gnatty hoards of colors and cocktails, wishing he could scream everything he feels without anyone actually hearing, and without sounding crazy. Things like _fuck you, I am not meeting my girlfriend and I am not straight and Jade’s not my boyfriend and I’m not gay and I’m certainly not beautiful, not by your eyes anyway, if this is the way you see the world, see my flesh._

And he wishes he could just shed it, like a grasshopper or a snake or a potato bug, just shuck off his exoskeleton like something dry and useless and split, something light enough to be carried away on the Santa Anas blowing in from the coast. He knows the way people see and assume shouldn’t matter, because he understands his own complexity, the softness inside the cavities of that infuriatingly unshed-able skin. 

His mouth tastes sour for the instant he remembers that this is why he needs Jade too, as much as Jade needs him. Possibly more, seeing as he’s lacking the void that sings for normalcy. 

He needs Jade because Jade sees him free of assumption, his insect insides that would be formless without the shell, words and blood and art and everything else that makes up the parts of a person undefined by bones. Jade sees him the way he is when he wants to be exposed and understood, and when he doesn’t.

Jade’s the exception. And what an exception he is. 

When Davey gets to Starbucks Jade’s already outside, sitting shotgun in his silver sports car with his sunglasses on even though it’s dark. The headlights hum, and she’s sitting there behind the wheel with her elegant, golden hand curled around it looking perfect and expensive, some piece of crystal or china you can buy from glass cases at gas stations along the 5 freeway. In case you get an impossible urge to purchase something pointless and delicate when you’re traveling through somewhere unbeautiful. 

Davey’s stomach is instantly sick. Every time he sees her this happens to him; it’s as visceral and impulsive a response as fear, as anger. It just rushes over him and he stops in his tracks, poised on the edge of the curb holding his jacket with white-knuckles, waiting for Jade to see that he’s here and get out of the car. 

She sees him first, dark eyes widening from slits and mouth flashing into a tight line for a second, perhaps awash with the same sickness, the same instant fear and anger. But then she turns and touches Jade’s arm, nods to the window and Davey can imagine the outline of her glossy pink lips soundlessly saying, _He’s here_. 

They have a lot in common, she and Davey. They both buy MAC makeup and study fashion, they both count calories and go to the gym and love New York. They also both love Jade. Probably hate him, too, although Davey is loath to give her enough credit to experience something as real and fierce as love and hate combined. 

Jade leans across the divider between the passenger and drivers side and kisses her on the cheek, index finger curling cutely underneath her chin. He’s never touched Davey like that before, like he was a kid or a kitten or something. Davey’s fairly certain that if he were driving that car, Jade would be reaching across to tighten a fist around his throat. That, or he wouldn't be sitting shotgun at all. 

Davey watches, eyes burning and something lying down inside him, curling up in on itself and disappearing. They’re picturesque, together. A boy and a girl in a sports car, blonde and shining and in Hollywood. And Davey feels like a tourist, here in West Hollywood and here beside them, two ends of the spectrum and he exists beyond it, outside of it, on something entirely different. 

That’s one of the downsides of the alien, of being more than human. It’s fucking lonely. 

Jade slams the car door and jogs to meet up with Davey, tripping over the curb because he’s still wearing his sunglasses. She waves to them both as she drives away, a fake smile plastered on white teeth, pink lips. 

“Hi,” Jade says, holding his hand out like he wants to drag it down Davey’s jaw, place it on the belt holding up his slacks, or maybe, because Davey is a stranger in these streets and an impostor to the void of normalcy, shake hands. 

Instead the hand just hangs out there, dead air on the radio and dead flesh in an absence between two bodies. It’s like they’re on different planets, have ever met. “How was the gig?” Jade asks then, hand dropping to his side, disappearing into his pocket. 

“It was really, really fun. It was great to see them. Those guys say hi, by the way,” Davey says, revolted to notice he’s using his _interview voice_ , the over-expressive, tinny voice edged with a sarcasm that seems lost on everyone. Everyone but Jade, who nods slowly, eyes darting beneath his shades. He takes them off, folds one arm into the collar of his navy blue V-neck. 

“I see.” 

They walk side by side but not together, passing the Starbucks, passing Rage, passing the closed storefront of an American Outfitters, where white plastic mannequins stare eyelessly back at them donning “Gay LA” teeshirts and colorful briefs over comically huge packages. They’re heading towards increasingly less populated streets, the seedier half of West Hollywood, with its sex-shops and peep shows. Davey is walking faster and faster, Jade struggling to keep up. 

“Where are we going? All the food places are that way...” Jade says weakly, and Davey’s done. Can’t stand it anymore, the fear and the fury as they twist into something years old, something wounded and bandaged. 

“Jade,” he says suddenly, seeing as his vocabulary has been reduced to the only word he knows when he’s braindead. When he’s all the way dead. What he’ll use his last death rattle of a breath to say. He stops in his tracks, turning to face Jade and tightening a hand over his own scarf, tied into his collar like a cravat. “When I see you two together...” he sputters, then stops. 

Jade rushes in, mouth twitching. “I am so sorry Dave, I didn’t think--”

Davey holds a hand up abruptly and sound ceases from Jade’s lips. “No. It’s not that, it’s just....when I see you two together, sometimes I understand. Not all the time, but sometimes I see you two the way _you see yourselves_. The way you want to be seen, all perfect and easy.” 

Narrowing his eyes, Jade takes a nervous, involuntary step back. These are words he’s never heard from Davey, and he’s on guard, careful. 

“When I see you that way,” the feelings powering what Davey is saying catch up with him and he stumbles, eyes faltering and darting to the dirty pavement, where a condom wrapper and twisted water bottle lie at his feet. “I just want to give up, because I believe you. I believe everything,that this is my fault and this is what you want, and you two are actually happy together, and I’m as crazy as you say I am. And I want to stop fighting.” 

Jade laughs then, shaking his head and jamming both his hands as far into his pockets at they go, past the bones in his wrists. It’s a moment before he says, “You, Davey, you’re something else. You are really, honestly...I don’t even know. _Beyond description_.” 

Davey laughs too, short frantic barks of too much air. Jade’s called him a lot of things that always fall short, _piece of work, work of art, brilliant, insane, too much, impossible_. He supposes this is evidence that they’ve _both_ given up, stopped trying to cut and cut and label and sterilize and study. That they’re resigned to the crash. 

“Glad to know I elude you still,” Davey says carefully with a dry mouth. 

“Always.” 

They’re quiet, looking at each other and somehow they’ve moved closer, encroaching upon that divide separating them in different cities, continents, worlds. Or maybe that divide never existed, and it was something Davey imagined and constructed in an effort to suck away the pain of understanding Jade, of seeing him without assumption. Seeing not only the way he really is, but the way he sees himself. 

Davey wants to scream. Instead his chest is barely touching Jade’s, and they’re too close for public, Jade’s hands rubbing insistent, disbelieving circles into the bones of Davey’s wrists, mouth working around words he can’t say. 

“When I see you two together, I just want to give you to her,” Davey whispers, and Jade’s grip tightens, his sternum vibrating with cough-laughter. There is a heavy, seemingly endless silence stretching between them, around them in this world they suddenly both inhabit. Then there’s the far away sounds of car horns, alcohol vomit hitting the pavement, men screaming, catcalls, dog yelps. There’s traffic rushing by, an forever-long line of twisting red and white lights in quiet, resilient opposition to one another. Waiting and cutting, Davey is tired when Jade finally speaks.

“Dave, even if you were telling the truth, even if you _believed yourself_ , you could not fucking get rid of me if you tried your hardest,” his voice is the most solid thing. He adds, “I’m sorry, but you’re stuck fighting.”

And Davey finally lets his forehead touch Jade’s, lets their breathing fall in tandem. They expand and contract together, a natural thing having relinquished control of the steering and breaks, approaching an inevitable end of aluminum siding diminished to collapsed heaps like sheets in a cold bed. Davey closes his eyes, and wants to scream. 

 

~*~

September 2010

Death in LA differs from death in the East Bay in the same way death differs from summer to winter. Los Angeles is a perpetual summer, everything so fat and spoiled and pregnant with excess that it’s too drunk to even realize that the slow, insidious death of fall is waiting just around the corner. Branches are swollen and collapsing under the weight of too many oranges, and no one can possibly pick and eat them all. So of course, they start to rot. LA’s supposed to be a desert, anyway, not a patchwork of kelly green, water-sucking lawns. It denies its own death. 

The East Bay is dying too, Davey’s always thought so. The difference is that it doesn’t try and cover it up. Trees in winter wear their layer of frost with pride, with beauty... but summer is just an ornamented corpse, smearing foundation on its leprosy and parading around talking through a ventriloquist mouth. 

Strangely enough, when Davey and Jade first start seeing each other again on a fairly regular basis, Davey prefers it to be in the southern half of the state, between the billboards and the dead-end movie sets crumpling to dusty heaps every time he tries to gallop off into a sunset. It’s comforting, somehow, to seek the only authentic connection he’s ever really experienced in the depths of the kingdom of denied death. 

He can keep going then, keep breathing, because LA is still hurtling ever onwards, even though the heart’s stopped beating. It makes it easier for him to continue believing the lie that whatever he had with Jade _was_ authentic connection. In LA, the contrast makes it feel almost authentic. It seems more than a lie, merely a miscalculation, perhaps. 

That’s not the way it is anymore, though. Davey’s not sure if he’s grown so old that his lies have becomes truths, or if he’s stopped caring whether or not things are authentic, but within the last few months he’s grown wary of LA, and weary of the Summer and its indulgent death. He assumed Jade would refuse when he told him _I think you should come to Oakland next time_ , but remarkably enough Jade didn’t put up the slightest of fights, and drove eight hours the next day, arriving bloodshot and with his hood up on Davey’s doorstep sometime after dusk. It makes sense to Davey now, that Jade would want to draw their mess away from his home, spill the blood a safe distance from his clean, tidy illusion. 

Davey doesn’t care why Jade agrees, it’s the fact that he’s here and breathing in the self proclaimed, even _proud_ death of winter at Davey’s house that matters.

When Jade comes to Oakland, Davey gets quiet out of force of habit. The last time they lived in that house together was after Sing the Sorrow, when Davey lost his voice and cracks started to run through them so frequently it was hard to hold the structure together, ice becoming water that seeped between loose, slatted fingers. Davey feels like a ghost, this mute version of himself weighted down in memories of a time when Jade always looked too tired to be alive. 

It feels like the past when Jade comes to Oakland, not a perfect past, but a real one, when they were still tricking themselves into believing it might still work. And when it doesn’t feel like the past, it feels like Davey’s dreaming it. Or, it feels like the real version of a dream, it feels like the picture Davey kept in his mind for a long time after Jade left of how they’d look, or how they were supposed to be before the earth stopped. 

It’s easier to forget about her, young and new and still moving, when they’re at Davey’s house. 

They’re on Davey’s couch in Davey’s TV room in Davey’s house in Oakland, sitting close enough for their knees to touch, but nothing else, pretending to read and do crosswords in this screenplay of how people act when they’ve been together for a long time. Davey’s TV room is kind of a joke, because it doesn’t have a TV in it. It has an entertainment center, sure, but it’s packed with this high-end stereo and enough CDs to sink a ship, the stuff Davey’s really made out of, music and plastic. Then there’s the art collections on the walls(insert names here), all of the concrete things Davey’s spend his fortune on, all of them purchases justified in his mind because they’re more than jewel cases and canvas and acrylic and the glossy shine of photography paper. They’re people’s life stories and manifestos and presentations, they’re metaphors and folklore. 

Davey has built lies to justify the fact that he’s a materialist and a capitalist, just like the rest of them. In this way, Davey is vaguely aware of his hypocrisy, and that his TV room is like LA, like the summer. Lying about its life when really it’s just suffocated and unbreathing plastic like everything else. Jade’s house is different, it’s full of _actual_ consumer items, not windows to look through and see stories, but just sheet glass in wooden frames. He has espresso machines and even a margarita maker he bought for her, suede pillows and a golf cart and an immersion blender and a bathtubs with jets and electric toothbrushes and sets of coconut massage oils and reflective stickers for the bike helmet he never wears because he never rides his bike. Jade’s house, in a way, is almost more authentic because it’s _purely_ pointless, purely useless. There are no layers or lies at Jade’s house in LA, just his own body lying prostrate in winter, having given up and saying _I want nothing more than this_. 

Maybe this is why Davey wants Jade in his home, and can no longer swallow being in Jade’s. Because there are too many lies in LA, but Jade’s house is the cruel, blanched, impossible truth. And Davey’s not ready for the purity of uselessness. He needs metaphor to explain himself, otherwise he’s not a hero of art, resisting the desert for true, authentic death. He’s not even a con artist, or a liar. He’s just a fool in his TVless TV room, playing a part in a picture he painted of how they were supposed to be, if Jade hadn’t started telling the truth by lying. 

And it would be perfect, a perfect version of this come-to-life fantasy picture of a universe where Davey was quiet, but learned to speak again, but it’s not. Not today, because Davey cannot forget about her. He’s not exactly sure why (though it could be anything, the way Jade’s clothes smell faintly like her lotion, or the way Jade has a tiny, prim spot of color on his collar bone where she sucked skin that was not hers to suck) but it’s impossible. He wants it to feel like the past, he wants the power of the East Bay’s winter-death and lack of lies to somehow make it easier to believe his own chest of them, but he can’t. 

Every time he looks at Jade, disheveled and wearing Davey’s boxers with his lips still swollen from sucking him off, all he sees is her, young and new and still moving. And with Jade. With all of him. 

He swallows, hands moving around the mug of tea he’s been nursing so long it’s lukewarm. There are days when he knows he has all of Jade. He has his history, and the boy he used to be. He has all Jade’s scars,and he’s done more than kiss them, he’s helped carve them, he knows why they’re there. He remembers. He has the part of Jade who hates himself, the part who was ashamed of wanting Davey, ashamed of wanting flesh and ashamed of having it. He has the part of Jade who used to want to die. And most importantly, he shares his _art_. Even if he and Jade never fucked again, he would have all these things, and he would have Jade’s art and Jade’s self loathing and his whole self, until they both died. He has the realities, which are all that matter to Davey, on most days. He can be okay with the fact Jade still lives with, pays for, and fucks her, because he possesses the part that really counts. 

On most days. Days that aren’t days like today, when it seems like she has _everything_. She has the Jade that the fans see, that the internet sees, that the real world sees. She has the side of himself that he loves, the side of himself he wants to be consumed by and defined as. She might not have the Jade who’s living and breathing with all of his whorls and complexities, but she has the Jade that will die and go down in history, while Davey fades into his words, his own shattered image, and his cipher that tried to tell the real story. 

And on days like today, that seems like the only thing that matters. Fuck the reality, fuck the art. Art only matters to the people who make it, and Davey has always known that it’s folly to believe otherwise, that it’s folly to think you can change the world, or that you will ever be understood or presented the way you want to be, the way your art is intended to be. You will only be seen as cipher. Pigeonhole and cipher. 

He’s been pondering this and growing increasingly bitter over it when he blurts to Jade, “You realize you’ve ruined her life, but loving me still, right?” 

Jade actually jumps, startled away from his crossword puzzle. After all, he’s used to the quiet Davey, the one who broke his throat singing the sorrow six years ago. “Come again?” he says with a hoarse voice. 

Davey doesn’t want to repeat himself and he knows that Jade heard, so he just looks at Jade, with his dark eyes unblinking, until Jade sighs an immense, irritable sigh and says, “Her life? No, not her life. There’s more to life than love, Dave.” 

His answer takes Davey by surprise, because it exposes him as a hypocrite, assuming of Jade what is truth to himself because all he knows how to do is project pigeonhole and cipher. “I guess you’re right,” he says after a moment, dropping his eyes to the book on his lap that he hasn’t been reading. _I guess you’re right_ echoes in his head. 

But Davey doesn’t _believe_ that, even when he wants to. He can’t. He will never be the type of person who believes that there is more to life than art, or that love is not just another medium of artistic expression. He wouldn’t have made it his life’s work if it were any other way. 

And what’s more, is that Davey doesn’t believe Jade is that type of person, either. He wouldn’t keep coming back to Davey, starved and with black in his eyes, if it were any other way. 

Davey’s always thought of himself as a hero of art, but he knows that the unfortunate truth is that he’s not that important, not that beautiful. He’s merely a hero of love, he and Jade two heros of love together, which is so much more unromantic. He sighs, the quiet that fell after he answered Jade depressing him. So he says, with the knowledge he’ll regret it, “But...what kind of _person_ is she if it’s _not_ ruining her life?” 

Jade’s eyes flash, a darkness obscuring his features for the moments it takes for him to come up with an answer that will end the conversation, because it’s clear he doesn’t want to go into this. And then the darkness is gone, replaced by a look of smooth, lying indifference. “A normal person.” 

And once again, He’s right. And not even the _real_ Jade, who is as fraught with passion asDavey is, but the _logical_ Jade, the careful one who keeps himself locked and cage-like to protect the world around him from getting scorched by their burning. Jade the voice of logic is right. Davey hates it, and he wants to throw himself at Jade’s feet and hook his thumbs in the waistband of his sweats and beg, _beg_ him to explain how the fuck he justifies this whole mess to himself. He wants to drop to his knees and scream _how can you love her, if she’s not destroyed and driven mad and inspired by NOT HAVING ALL OF YOU? What on earth is remotely interesting about her if she’s not an artist? Not a lover? How can you possibly relate to let alone supposedly LOVE her if she isn’t a hero of ANYTHING?_

Davey does not live in illusion over this. He knows he’s not a hero. In fact, he’s much worse than that, he’s not even an _antihero_ , he’s just in love. But she, _she’s_ not even enough to trick herself into believing she’s a hero, she doesn’t even have the creativity and agency to _lie_ a lie she could get lost in.

He’s heating up on the couch, his insides writhing and sweat beginning to collect in all the places that he’s creased. His grand soliloquy where he proves Jade is a coward is dissolving into petty arguments and undistilled hurt, things like _how can you love her? How can you love her when she drinks wine and eats meat buys leather? How can you love her if she doesn’t even hurt herself? How can you understand her scars? How can she understand yours?_

“Are you alright...?” Jade asks Davey like it’s a labor intensive process, and talking exhausts him. He’s looking up but the expression on his face is pained. Davey realizes he must have been sitting for awhile with fire in his eyes, sitting there seething and self-hating and not understanding the one thing he thought he was wired to understand. 

“Am I ever?” he answers quietly, and they both smile fake smiles in Oakland, in the house they’ll never share for more than a few days at a time anymore, the house from the photographs in Davey’s future-memory when he thought he would always understand. 

Davey wonders what it says about him that he knows even if he had the means to escape his darkness, he wouldn’t, and what it says about Jade that he doesn’t have the means, but he’s trying anyway.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> People don't like that I think Davey and Jade ended just because it fell apart, rather than them getting split by some horrible event. Sorry if you're one of those people.

June 2010

It’s very dark and Davey knows where nothing is. He’s always wondered what it would be like to plunge off a bridge into water. He always imagines this scenario at night, because unlike many things, he’s not sure he’d want his death to be public, especially if he failed. And _if_ he failed, and _if_ it was dark, how would he find his way to the top? He’s always wondered how you swim to the surface, how you know which was if is the surface in pitch black, in cold water, without a broken neck and impact pain singing through all of your skin and the holes inside of you torn up. 

This is how he feels now. Swimming directionlessly in Dark, struggling for the surface but too blind and hurt to know which way is up, which way is down. What is right or not. His arms are crossed over his chest like a corpse, and he’s in his bed, but even that feels far away, an ocean of sheets he could drown in. He slowly raises his palms to his face, pointing how elbows to what could be his ceiling, what could be the promise of the surface and oxygen and survival, but could be deeper into cold water. 

“It would have been better with a broken neck,” he says, knowing he’s being cryptic but not caring. Sometimes Jade gets these things. Sometimes, more lately, he does not. This is why they’re here, why limbs are pinwheeling frantically in all directions, black water in all directions, lungs burning with brackish wet they’ve inhaled. 

Jade makes a noise that could be broken down into words, but Davey’s not trying very hard. He thinks that maybe if he stops flailing for one moment, the natural inclination to float will draw him a few inches towards whatever direction is the surface, and then he can fight his way there. So of course, he’s flailing harder than ever. So hard it might break his neck.

“ _What?”_ Jade tries again, and Davey is suddenly even sicker and wilder with feeling alone. 

“I don’t think we should do this anymore. It’s not working,” Davey says, translating himself for Jade the way he hates to do. Of course, this makes it sound like a break-up. Like a relationship.As if they were actually _in_ a relationship, one you could end or move on from or negotiate the terms of. He makes it sound like something like that, just so Jade can _understand._

“What do you mean?” Jade breathes, voice very thin with hurt, which assures Davey he’s on the right track. “What doesn’t work, this has _never_ worked.” 

“It’s not even working in the way it usually does,” Davey tries to explain, voice muffled because he’s choking himself. “I’m not grounded in pain, I don’t feel at all. Usually, the way you make me miserable is at least grounding, at least real. The pain of not having you and the pain of being forced to have you is everything when it’s there Jade, it’s real, it’s _reality_. But right now...I can’t...” He struggles, realizing he’s stopped translating again and is speaking in truth right now, and he can sense Jade _not understanding_ which of course, proves his point. 

He knows that to some degree, he never had to translate for Jade in the past because he _tried very hard_ to be understood, he tried very hard for every word to count and mean exactly what it meant so Jade would know what he was saying. Then, after years of this, that was when they spoke the same language. It is unfair for him to feel betrayed now, because he’s not speaking in their language, he’s speaking in his, and he’s making no effort what so ever to be understood. Jade’s lack of comprehension is both of their faults, but still, still, Davey feels like this is the end of something, like he is alone. 

“This just happens to you sometimes. You don’t feel, you...” Jade starts, but he suddenly stops, his voice cutting out. 

“It does happen, but when I don’t feel, I don’t _feel anything but you_. Usually. But not this time.” 

“I’m included?” 

“I feel as alone with you as without you,” Davey finishes, summing it up neatly as if it could be summed up neatly. 

They are quiet in the dark for awhile, and it is easy for Davey to imagine that they’re somewhere that isn’t his room, that they’re floating in space, sucked into a black hole, in the heart of forest surrounded by things waiting for them to sleep so that they can be eaten. It feels possible that Davey could stand up and take a step in any direction only to plunge off a bridge and to his death. Imagining these fates feels identical to knowing that he is home, in his own bedroom and next to Jade. Just as possible. Just as safe. Just as achingly, endlessly lonely. 

“I’m uncertain that if I reach out towards you, I’d be able to touch you. It feels like you’re not there at all,” Davey continues after too long of a silence, and he can tell by the way the space around and between them feels that Jade is hurt, he is wounded so deeply by these things that Davey is saying. He can tell because he would _hate_ to hear these things from Jade, who he _knows_ suffers the same fate, apathy concerning all else except, mysteriously, chronically, Davey. To hear otherwise is a loss of truth, loss of a truth that has existed for years. 

Jade makes a sound again, and it’s followed by the shifting noises of him turning over in Davey’s bed. The anchoring sensation of suddenly knowing where he is startles Davey, because his world is instantly given direction. Left is Jade. Right is wall. Up is ceiling. Down is floor. His breath catches, and then Jade says in a thick, young-sounding voice, “That’s bullshit. I don’t buy it. I don’t believe you, Dave.” 

And then he does the impossible, and swims towards the surface. He reaches out and grabs Davey’s bicep, his hand sliding across the skin because it is wet with tears. “You’re _choosing_ not to feel me. You’re choosing it. Because it’s too painful.” 

Davey laughs suddenly, fiercely, the rage of it clawing the inside of his chest. “ _I don’t choose not to feel things._ That’s you, Jade.” 

The bed is weak and groaning with all the movement atop it, as Jade shifts to straddle Davey, push his elbows apart in the dark. Davey notices that Jade is shaking. “No.” Jade says, smelling like salt. “Maybe so, maybe that is me, but it’s you, too. And maybe that’s my fault, for making you go though the shit I do, but _Dave_ ,” his voice breaks over the word, like it is the one word he’s been dreading and longing to say. “Dave...I don’t believe that you can’t feel me.” 

Jade covers Davey’s body with his own, the weight of him hot and crushing and too real. It doesn’t feel good, it doesn’t hurt, it doesn’t anything. Davey is stealing himself, escaping into the perfect silent blackness of cold water under a bridge, and imagining the sound his neck will make when it breaks. His hands lie limp at his sides, when they usually cannot help tearing into Jade in fury and want. 

“ _Stop_ ,” Jade begs, pushing himself against Davey like a brick-layer. “Let me in. Quit this bullshit.” His voice is harsh, scraping though tears and determination, and Davey hears it but doesn’t listen. He refuses. He _refuses_ not because it might hurt, but because it might _not_. And then he will be right, this whole game won’t be a game anymore and he will actually be alone. His hands twitch and convulse, but do not grip Jade’s biceps. He doesn’t let himself acknowledge the fact that this time, it is Jade fighting for all of him, instead of the usual reverse. He might feel, and he doesn’t want that yet. 

“I know how you get sometimes. How it seems like too much, and you’re afraid to listen to your favorite songs because what if they don’t save you this time, what if they don’t _work_ and then you’ll be left with nothing, right? But this isn’t like that. Because your songs can’t beg you to listen but _I can_ , I’ll hurt you Dave, I’ll hurt you until...” Jade’s murmuring desperate and blind, his forehead braced into the pillow next to Davey and his drool and tears running wet and irritating into Davey’s ear. And his nails are long and digging into Davey’s passive back, they’re not making it curl, they’re not making his spine snap or his neck break they feel like nothing, like nothing at all, and his teeth are digging and biting as hard as they can into the muscle of his shoulder, his upper arm, the inside of his upper arm and--

“ow!” Davey suddenly yelps, the pain of it sickening, enraging. He tries to throw Jade off of him, he tries to turn and hold him down under the water and drown and swim to the surface, but he’s grounded and held fast by pain. All of it suddenly flickers to life as he feels pain, the ribbons his back has been reduced to, the bruises from Jade’s teeth. 

“No,” Jade growls, holding him down and backhanding him across the face, which explodes in blaring pain and the deafening rush of blood in his ears. It’s a very bad shot because they can see nothing in the dark, and it catches Davey on the mouth. His lip breaks and blood is suddenly hot and sticky on his teeth and leaking into his nose when he tilts his head back, and he strikes wildly upward with no leverage, because Jade has pinned him to the bed again. r32;  
Jade bends and bites the first flesh that he comes into contact with, which happens to be the very tightly stretched skin of Davey’s chest and sternum. Davey yells again, bucking his hips and thrashing desperately but to no avail. He can usually overpower Jade, but most of his strength is being funneled in towards the increasingly difficult task of not feeling. Of not relenting. But Jade bites him again, his tongue sloppy and desperate as he tries to lick the pain away, nails dug blood-deep into his arms, and Davey stops breathing, stops fighting, and sinks away from the surface. 

The sob rips through both of them, this loud, animal thing that reminds Davey of being a kid, being a teenager, being incapable of stopping tears and incapable of knowing why they kept coming. He grips Jade into him, savagely pawing all over Jade’s writhing body with the force of hate and foolishness. 

“Please, please, please,” Jade is mumbling, pressing painful kisses too-hard on Davey’s throat, bruising his windpipe. Then he is saying “yes, yes, yes,” once Davey is hurting him back, striking him with close fists on his ribcage, biting the loose skin of his forearms. He’s sick and gagging on all the feeling that rushed into him, sick with hating how he can’t control it, even though most of him does not want to be the type of person who doesn’t let himself feel. 

What happens is that sometimes he shuts off, like a lamp with a burnt out bulb, filled with the tittering hiss of something broken inside a globe of glass. He shuts off and he _can’t_ feel, everything is pretending and going through the motions, singing and speaking and sleeping and shitting. Then he’ll realize he’s a hull, cracked and with the seeds scattered outside of him and only a pulse to remind him he’s living. Only a pulse and the sickness of whatever Jade is doing to him for the time being. The sickness of hating Jade, of loving him. 

But sometimes it seems like it would be easier to swallow water than go through this again. He can shut off feeling for Jade, just as he can shut off feeling for anything. But Jade will always find him, he’ll follow him to the bridge and leapt off after him and the sound of another body hitting the water will tell Davey where he is. He can shut off feeling Jade, but only until Jade turns him on again. And he can’t shut off the feeling of wanting that. 

He hurts him back, with fists and teeth. He pushes Jade’s head under the water and holds him down, counts to ten, only a pulse to remind him that he’s living. 

They sink together into the dark, and Davey is very unsure of which way is up. 

September 2011

Jeffree’s pink hair is all over Davey’s faux-silk pink pillow case. The two shades of pink clash, and it’s bothering Davey in this far away, irritating fashion, like a splinter festering its way out of calloused flesh. So he slides his palm under the weight of Jeffree’s head and drags it onto his chest, so it covers the inked red of his heart tattoo so that he doesn’t have to witness the clashing of those ill-matched colors, either. He sifts his fingers through the brittle, dyed-half-to-death pink of Jeffree’s hair that’s really more of an overexposed orange, like the sun-faded lipstick orange of a pornstar on a billboard out on the 605 freeway. Jeffree purrs in response. 

They hold each other in bed, Davey shirtless because it’s too hot outside, but both of them otherwise fully clothed. They’re tangled in the easy embrace of friends who used to fuck, but haven’t in a long time. An understanding is present between their skin, a muscle-memory knowledge of one another’s bodies that allows for the accessories of almost-sex, without being sex. 

Davey presses a tired kiss to Jeffree’s salmon-pink hairline, and Jeffree licks sloppily at the hollow under his clavicle. It’s probably going to be like this for the rest of their friendship: almost sex, but never again. 

Davey has lots of friends like this, people who love him unconditionally because before he was flesh and blood and in their life, he was their blood under their own hand, their blood on his lyric booklets. They thought they knew him before they _actually_ knew him, and for that reason he’ll be forever untarnished if he keeps the right distance. They’re love him forever, because they were kids and they were AFI fans and he allotted them glimpses of his real self, the self left shredded and vulnerable and desperately, pathetically love-starved after Jade. 

Jeffree might be in love with Davey. Davey’s not sure, because it’s hard to disentangle his friends’ love for him as Davey Havok Lord and Saviour from their love of him as Dave, old and broken. He knows that sometimes, however, Jeffree looks at him in that soul-bearing and soul-invading way, longing pulling his lip down to reveal the flash of teeth that would tear his jugular out after pleading _please, give me the real you. Whatever it is, I will love it, because you saved me._ It was easy to brush such whole, shining want away as mere admiration. _You love me because I saved you. You love me because you want to be like me, you want to conceal yourself from your fans and have them hate you and want you for it, to have them long to peel and make-up off and suck the imperfect skin underneath. You’re obsessed with me. You’re infatuated with me. You wish you were me, but you’re not in love with me. You can’t be, because we’re not equals._

Davey snuffles into Jeffree’s hair, and smells the strawberry-scent of his shampoo. It reminds him of a lifetime ago, elementary school maybe when he had a babysitter who smelled like artificial strawberries, scratch and sniff, markers, anything fake and glitter-pink but not quite real. He absentmindedly tongues a strand of that hair into his mouth, sucking on it and thinking of all those times he’s stood staring back silently, wondering if Jeffree loved him, knowing it was a love he could not return. 

He runs a hand up Jeffree’s back, feeling the bones sharp and angled under his tee-shirt, jutting into his palm and forcing him to think of all those times he pressed his chest into the sweating landscape of that convex spine, sinking into the comfort of a body that received and drowned him, a body that never resisted, only loved and loved and waited. Davey inhaled raggedly, despising his own weakness. 

“Bitch, you’re too skinny,” Jeffree sighs, poking Davey below the navel, where he’s sunken and hollow in a way he could never remember being before these last few years. 

“I’ve been telling you that for years,” Davey’s voice shatters the image he has of himself being as small and clean and young and beautiful as the artificial strawberry on his chest. His voice sounds old, scratchy, distinctly male. 

“I’m a model. It’s in my job description,” Jeffree smiles and Davey feels his lips curl against his sternum, and everything inside him aches for Jade, who never smiles when his mouth is on Davey’s skin. 

Davey’s hands fly to his eyes, heels of his palms pressing into the sockets so explosions of color distract him there, from all the things he is sick from thinking about. “Ugh,” he mumbles wordlessly, displacing Jeffree’s slight weight with his shifting. He sits there and watches a personal maze of neon and black kaleidoscoping, aware that Jeffree is watching him, _studying him_. It feels invasive so he drops his hands, glares. “What?” 

Jeffree smirks and gathers his endless limbs up under him, something about his complacent slowness and deliberateness of motion seeming feline. He’s quiet and grinning and then he says “Is my dick bigger than his?” 

Davey stares, a coppery flavor suddenly new and biting on his tongue, like he forgot how to taste until this second. “Who?” He asks, as if he’s not readable, and somehow a part of the objective and untouched artificiality around him instead of this human thing that breathes and hurts. 

Jeffree rolls his eyes. “Jade just has this small dick thing about him. Like, he’s doing the opposite of overcompensating by being too girly, because he’s so self-conscious he has to have more than one degree of separation between him and his denial.” 

Davey snorts because it’s not untrue, not exactly anyway. He narrows his eyes at Jeffree, trying to catch a glimpse of that vulnerability, that longing desperation to be more than one of Davey Havok’s many friends he fucks. Maybe Jeffree was bringing this up out of some masochistic need to compare himself to the one that _was_ more. “I don’t remember the size of his dick,” is what Davey says. This puts Jade with Jeffree: one he fucked, but doesn’t anymore. This, of course, is a lie. 

Jeffree rolls over onto his back, so he and Davey are lying side by side like brothers, staring at the ceiling and more than a few inches apart. “You were so fucked up when we met,” Jeffree says after a few seconds, just as Davey was about to reach for his hand and lace their fingers together, dissipating the suddenly uneasy silence. But his hand stops and he laughs, because Jeffree’s leaving out the part where Davey is still fucked up. 

“I did cry a lot,” Davey mused, thinking of the familiar, snot and tear slicked surface of Jeffree’s then nineteen year old shoulder. 

“Mmhm. It made you easy to seduce,” Jeffree turns and winks, his eyes looking strange without their usual layers and layers of power. They’re quiet for another few moments, looking at each other trying to read faces, when both of them are so used to masks. Then Jeffree opens his mouth, pauses, and opens his mouth again. 

“You cried so much I never really figured out what the hell was going on. I feel like you were used to talking to him, so you didn’t have to translate it so anyone else could understand you.” Jeffree is pushing, pushing into the tender, stitched place where Davey’s mask meets his jawline. It hurts. 

Davey closes his eyes, unable to look at so much clashing pink. “I hadn’t learned a universal language yet, no. You don’t need to articulate yourself that way when someone speaks, or _doesn’t speak_ the same way you do. Language is superfluous.” 

That’s when Jeffree takes the final step, inching his thin, yearning frame a centimeter closer to Davey and asking point blank, “What happened?” This question is more than he dared to ask when they were fucking, when things were so delicately balanced he feared anything could shut Davey off and lose all of him forever. Davey knows this, because he manipulated the scale to be so wavering, he enacted that fear by speaking in code, and allowing only so much to seep through the slats in the floorboards. 

“Honestly, I’ve always wondered. It’s been long enough since it happened that I think you should tell me.”

Davey inhales sharply. He’s surprised to feel a flood in his throat, so many words bubbling furiously to the surface. _He’s never told the whole story._ And there are a lot of reasons why he hasn’t, but he’s never realized until this second that the biggest one is that _no one has ever asked_. Not like this. So he answers, with this terrible choke, “ _I don’t know.”_

He’s never told the whole story. 

He’s dropped bits and pieces and almost-truths along the way. Maybe if Davey’s friends were to arrange in a line, the whole story would assemble between their margins. But even then, it would be _his_ story, his telling with its scaffolding and all the vague, imperfect subjectivity of memory. 

It’s not that Davey is being deliberately mysterious. And it’s not as if Jade’s version would be any more accurate. It’s that any version he tells will be insufficient in explaining the enormity. It’s the curse of language, and even more so the curse of _spoken_ language. There is no possible way he could possibly convey the things that happened with Jade _completely_ in a medium as weak and translucent and easily corrupted as language. The history is lost, the raw feeling, the mornings spent pressed to Jade, wondering how he could survive another second existing in a separate body...all lost. 

The story has remained locked away for so long in the vault of silence that grew between Davey and Jade when they stopped speaking their private, incomprehensible language to one another, that it’s rusted into something unrecognizable. Anything remembered solely by two men, one inadvertently buried in denial of the self, while the other voluntarily buried in the salt of his own self-awareness, is bound to decay. After all, Davey and Jade are both, in their own way, terrible, brilliant liars. 

Because of this, Davey is not sure where the reality, let alone the _truth_ of the story, lies. 

Maybe even _if_ Davey ever tried to tell the whole story, he couldn’t because he’s _not sure_. His protective layers and delusions and fury and wishes have draped the truth in various sheets of shadow, leaving the objective reality cloaked and obscured. 

And here, previously draped across him and now a safe, manageable distance away, is someone _asking_ him. The planes of Jeffree’s face are smooth and unassuming, seeking truth without everything that Davey has debased it with. Asking, “I want to know the whole story, Dave.” 

Maybe no one ever asked. 

Though it pains him, Davey evenly repeats, “I don’t know.”

“What do you mean you don’t know?” Jeffree asks, without accusation. His voice is careful with intent. 

“I mean...I mean that _I don’t know what really happened_. When you’re that angry--” Davey stops, moved by his inexplicable and foreign desire to tell the truth, if only for his own sake, and corrects himself. “When you’re _hurt_ that badly, you lie to protect yourself. And when you lie for that long, you believe yourself. So I don’t know what really happened, because I’ve been constructing this, this _distorted_ reality I can exist within for _four years_ , so the _real_ -reality has gotten..I don’t know. Lost in my psychosis and his denial.” 

Jeffree lies back down, and hums. “That’s kind of lovely.” 

“It’s not. There are so many layers. There’s my self-deprecation, my need to demonize him--”

“Nah-uh. I don’t want your watered down, psycho-bullshit story. I’ve listened to Decemberunderground, honey.” 

“Glad you think that’s psychobullshit.”

“Davey, Darling,” Jeffree pleads, suddenly uprighting himself and placing his huge, elegant white hand on Davey’s shrinking forearm. “You know I love you. I _adore you_. I adore you so much, I want to know _everything_.” He could pass for being merely a good friend, if it weren’t for the flashing, too-bright hunger in his eyes. 

But Davey doesn’t care. He wants to know the truth too, he wants to _try_ , wants to try and see himself stripped the way he sometimes does. The way he strips himself of his heroism, so he is just a old man. The way he strips Jade of all his essentialism, so he is just a consolation prize. He wants, in this moment, to strip the story of it’s subjectivity, so it is just a list of facts, free from his affliction of beauty. 

“Before you tell me,” Jeffree interrupts, holding up a slender, breakable index finger. “I have to ask: _why Jade_? Why, out of all the beautiful people in the world who would _die_ to be with you, Dave...why is Jade the one?” 

Davey things for a long time, about Jade stripped of his essentialism. He is about to answer cryptically, the way he usually does, but he stops himself to be reminded that this is his chance to be honest. So the answer is, “Because I feel alone. I feel alone with people, and I feel alone without people. But with Jade, I am never alone.” 

It seems inadequate, because there is no way those mere words can convey that it’s _more_ than aloneness he feels in crowded rooms. And it’s more than the absence of aloneness that he feels with Jade. It’s completeness, of his own whole. Or, it used to be. Now it’s the memory of completeness, which is more than the ache of being the only person in the world. 

“Hmmm,” Jeffree says noncommittally. And to prove Davey’s point, he adds: “I’m not following you. I need more.” 

So Davey closes his eyes, inhales, and slips under the surface of the sea. 

“Okay. This is what happened.”


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There is VERY GRAPHIC het in this chapter. Probably the most graphic het I've ever written, or at least the most graphic het I've written since I was, like, eleven and trying to prove to myself that I found heterosexual sex interesting (I was a weird kid.)

August 2010

“We should fuck,” she says, throwing her shaved legs over his lap. They weigh nothing, like they’re made out of silicon, and their dark like she might be Italian, Mexican, something. That or it’s a fake tan. He puts his hand on the legs, feeling the first pricks of stubble beginning.

“You, me, her...what do you think?” Her side is warm against his, a strand of her bottle-black hair, blue under the fluorescent lights in someone’s living room, getting stuck in the shimmer of lipgloss. She nods her head to her friend, the prettier one with too much eye makeup clotting her lashes together and snakebites through her lower lip. They nudge one another, look up at him half lidded, smiling. 

Music grinds from speakers, thudding deep in Davey’s gut. He’s at someone’s house, some friend of a friend, and he knows this song but he can’t remember who sings it, who remixed it. “How old are you two?” He asks, not sure of the answer but not opposed to the fucking regardless of what it is. 

They laugh, a high-pitched tittering like birds at springtime as it decays into summer, or breaking glass. “Nineteen,” she answers. “Both of us, swear to god.” 

“Oh I believe you. You don’t have to swear to him,” Davey says, coyness seeping into his voice even if he’s not sure if he can even get it up tonight. After all, it’s been awhile since he’s slept and he can tell they’ve been drinking.

He puts his hand, the one that’s not on golden girl-legs, on the crotch of his pants and pushes down slightly, just to see if he’s actually in a place right now to get hard and come. Some days all he wants is to fuck around with these kinds of girls, model-bodied and slutty and not smart, the kinds of girls his friends are friends with and that he doesn’t give a shit about. Girls who are just girls and not fans, so it doesn’t matter whether or not he becomes human or stays god, he’s just a guy to them, and sex is the only thing he has to perform. 

He’s not sure about tonight though. For hours he’s been feeling disconnected, caught somewhere purgatorial between the bassline and the pelegrino and cranberry juice in his plastic cup. The one with the rings through her lips leans in to the other’s neck, licks up it slowly with her eyes closed. There’s a stud in her tongue, and it’ll feel good on his dick, which stirs to life when he hears the other girl groan.

“Yeah,” he says, standing up and taking the one nearest to him in his arms, pulling her body flush against his chest. “Yeah, let’s do it.” 

He’s kissing her even though she tastes like alcohol. He doesn’t know what kind of alcohol, he’s not the kind of guy who can discern between brandy or whiskey or vodka or wine, it all tastes like something you clean wounds with to him. It all tastes like the hospital. 

Davey pushes a hand through her hair, which is oily and silky from being straightened, and one of his rings snags, making her flinch but stay silent. He doesn’t know what ring it is, because he doesn’t remember which ones he’s wearing tonight. The breath of the other girl, the prettier one, is boozy and warm on his neck, and she’s kissing little tiny wet kisses along the shell of his ear. He feels her index finger, taloned with an acrylic nail, rest upon then gently scrape his tattoo. 

“Who broke your heart?” She whispers, holding him from behind, trapping him between two walls of foreign fragrant flesh, this world of unmapped discoveries he’ll perform the conquest of. 

“I don’t have a heart,” he says with a smile, and as a bolus of limbs and tits and perfume, they stumble through someone’s hallway and into someone’s bathroom, kissing with too much tongue and too little feeling. Davey’s head is swimming and his breath comes short and uneven, his words unclear and disconnected. He doesn’t know why he feels drunk when he doesn’t know what being drunk feels like. He doesn’t know if this pretend-drunkenness is a performance, and if it is, why he’s performing it, and who for. 

It’s hard to keep upright, and he slams against the door, his spine hitting the frame and sending fireworks of pain through his fragilethin body. He transfers it, gripping the girl in front of him with bruising force, nails digging into her biceps and his teeth attacking her lips. He bites her and she acts like she likes it, making a noise in her throat and standing on her tiptoes to push herself into him harder. He doesn’t know if she actually likes it. 

The other one is tottering by the sparkling marble bathtub, giggling as she turns on the tap. “Look at this thing! It’s so fucking fancy.” She holds her hand into the spray, waiting for it to get warm and kicking her way out of her tiny spandex black mini-skirt. Her top follows it, this slinky backless thing with silver sequins like fishscales. 

Davey walks up behind her and cups her breasts in each hand, thumbing the nipples, his chin on her shoulder, where he presses a rough kiss. “Well come on, let’s take a shower. Use some of their expensive soap,” he says, smiling a dashing smile. The three of them laugh, children, rub a dub dub. 

The shower is not fancy and the soap is not expensive, not to Davey who knows interior designers and shops for cosmetics in San Francisco. Davey who gets free samples from Sephora because he’s a big customer, Davey who is shucking an entire ensemble of designer clothing to the floor of someone’s bathroom. It’s easy to play the part with these girls though, it’s easy to lie because they know nothing about him. Performing his lack of performance. 

The three of them step in to the shower, three different skins in three different shades, all of them tattooed to some degree. He wonders how old he looks to them, two nineteen year olds with their taut pierced tummies. Davey is convinced the reaper is coming for him any day now, that he’s aged tremendously in the last few years and now and can’t pass for thirty like he used to. He thinks this, but he knows better, and the girls don’t care, they’re laughing and soaping themselves and rubbing their flanks all over him like he’s one of them and not an old and dying man. 

There are many hands and mouths, and he bends one of the girls over and eases a finger into her tight ass, the muscles contracting around him like they’ve never felt this before. “You can fuck me like this,” he says to the other one, looking over his shoulder at her through the shower spray, his hair collapsed onto his forehead and dripping down his chin. “You can fuck me like this with your whole hand.” 

The girl over his arm and against the shower wall makes a small, feline noise, and arches her back as he adds another finger. He’s not sure if she’s pretending to like it, or if she actually does. It doesn’t matter. She is letting him. If it’s a performance, he doesn’t know why she’s performing it. 

The other one grips his dick, jerks him off like she’s jerked off lots of boys before, like she’s been practicing since she was fifteen. “Did this hurt?” She asks, toying with the barbell at the tip of his cock. 

“Things have hurt worse,” he tells her, sliding his fingers out of the other girl’s ass and rinsing barely there traces of shit out from under his nails. The water it getting cold but his dick is still hard, and he nudges it along her ass crack without the intention of fucking her, just feeling her with something other than his hand. He reaches in front of her and between her legs, palm slicking with wet that’s wetter than water. He pushes those fingers into the other girl’s mouth, shutting his eyes so he doesn’t have to see her pretend she likes it. 

They dry off with nice towels, the cushy white kind. The girl with the dyed black hair leaves inky smudges on the cotton, and they all laugh about that, kissing fervently between laughs because none of them have gotten off yet, just fooled around like kids at a sleepover, rub a dub dub. 

The bedroom is already taken, so Davey heads back to the couch, unstable and rocking still like he’s drunk. His hands are on a plush waist, his dick in a slim, warm hand. There are body parts and bones and spit, and he doesn’t know what belongs to who because everything is blurred along the edges and he hasn’t slept, and these girls look the same with their long hair, white smiles, dark eyes, plastic and makeup.

There are other people fucking in the living room, and the short-sirened frenetic beep and grind of dubstep. Davey sits on the edge of the couch, an arm around each girl as they kiss his throat, sucking tawdry marks into the stringy mess that’s his neck. He imagines a withered bulb fraying into nothingness under the burn of summertime. He feels old between them, this shell of a once living organism, the chrysalis already split to admit the winged thing once inside, or a skeleton shuddering to dust amidst cellular mitosis. 

Death between life, or death between death because they’re no different from him, not really.   
They kiss in front of him, and he watches their tongues tangle sloppily, and palms the back of their heads, pushing them together, the puppet master manipulating mindless marionettes. He moans, and lies, “You girls are so hot,” pretending he likes it. He doesn’t. But it doesn’t matter. Sex is a performance, and they are performing so he is performing back, negotiating a web of pretends, sticky and catching flies. 

He’s not sure which one is the prettier one anymore. They both look unreal and plastic like dolls now, things left out in the rain with their streaky mascara and shower-flushed skin. His dick is still hard, though, so he guides one of their hands to encircle it, not caring whose it is. 

They continue to kiss big, drooling pornstar kisses, and his eyes unfocus and focus again, not at what is in front of him, but what is beyond that. The room with its glass coffee table covered in a rainbow of wrapped condoms, the speakers rattling with Flux Pavillion, the couples on the floor and the recliner, all in various states of fuck. The air smells like sweat and come, and Davey holds his breath, allowing his eyes to fix on the couple farthest away from him, at the opposite side of the room. 

Jade’s hair needs to be trimmed. That’s the first thing Davey notices, and the thought is followed shortly by the familiar impulse to push it away from his shut eyes, tuck it behind his ear. Then he notices that Jade is shirtless, his chest a barrel of bones white and shining with sweat, speckled and imperfect with freckles. His hands with the spidery fingers are buried in her hair, pale claws wrist deep in blonde and kneading, her moon-round mouth sliding up and down the cock Davey knows the taste of, the feel of, the smell of. Jade looks like he’s sleeping, the gentle rock of his hips the only way Davey knows for sure he’s not. 

She is fully clothed, which is unsurprising to him. The crease in Jade’s brow tells Davey that he’s concentrating, thinking hard of some other mouth, some other girl, to get himself close enough to come. That, or he’s trying not to open his eyes, which will inevitably fall on Davey and his two nineteen year olds, which might make him come so quickly she’s suspicious. 

Davey closes his own eyes, lets one of the girls reach down between his thighs and under his balls, prodding unsurely for his asshole with an unlicked finger. 

“Here,” he says lazily, spitting and wiping it on the other girl’s hand. “Try again.” 

It’s the girl without the nails, so she’s able to push her index finger in, up to the second joint maybe but it’s not enough. He lifts his ass off the couch, grabbing her wrist and shoving her in, showing her how to really fuck him if she wants to fuck him. She whimpers, a whimper of want or shock or revulsion he’s not sure, but it doesn’t matter. Sex is a performance, and ambivalence makes for a good one, it forces the audience to read between the lines so the stupid ones get lost. 

She drops her forehead onto his shoulder, tears the packaging off a condom with her teeth and rolls the thing, sticky and ugly, onto him. The other girl climbs into his lap, lowering herself, dripping and teenage tight onto his latexed dick. He chokes because it’s good, arches his back up into her and onto the other girl’s fingers. His eyes fly open and fix on the only solid thing in the room. 

Jade is staring back at him, gaze smothering and impossible in its darkness. 

Davey’s stomach is a terrible thing, a vortex of shame and want all coiling and thrashing like a tempest. They watch each other, burning into one another with contained lust, made worse by the inability to make the word incarnate. They stare, Davey’s eyes watering with the force of staying open, and Jade’s adam’s apple bobbing with every desperate swallow. There’s a girl bouncing up and down on Davey’s cock, her tits firm and maybefake but still in his face, and he is staring across the room. The thought makes him bark in cold laughter, and she mistakes the sound for one of pleasure. 

He grips her around the waist, keeps her from turning around or looking at him and noticing that he’s not here, even though he hasn’t been here since the beginning. He’s been in purgatory, unsure and performing intoxication because performing intoxication is easier than admitting loneliness, because intoxication, for Davey, is never real, and loneliness always is. 

It is real and stretching between them and across the room, a yawning crevasse. Davey could reach out, but he would not touch Jade. He could reach as far as his arm would let him, and he would not touch Jade. He could stand up, walk across the carpet and past the coffee table with his palm outstretched and drop to his knees and still, he would not touch Jade. The imagined Jade or the real Jade, because neither was there. 

“Oh!” The girl to his left yelps when he comes, feeling his ass clamp down on her fingers and hold her there, threatening to swallow her. He shoots into the condom, holding the other girl down onto him, his hips pistoning into her, in time with fake little noises she’s making. 

He lays there panting for a moment, catching his breath and grimacing when the girl pulls her fingers from the gripping heat of his ass and it burns with not enough spit. Then he opens his eyes, gaze fixing on the opposite side of the room, where Jade is not. Where Jade has never been. He looks at the space Jade never occupied, and blinks at the empty, the stage his mind performed on because the reality wasn’t enough. 

The girl on top of him slides off and collapses to the right, her legs splayed and the space between them sloppy, pink, well fucked. “Your turn,” she says to her friend, waving her acrylic nails in the air. 

Davey turns to the other girl, her eyes wide and a little scared looking, because she just made him come by fucking his ass, and he pretended he liked it and so did she but she’s a bad actor and a bad reader and got lost between the lines. Really, he made himself come by fabricating things he could not have, but it doesn’t matter. He performed it and she was his audience, and she believed him. 

“You want me to get you off?” he asks, combing a damp hand through her hair. 

She nods, her eyes sliding back expertly into half-liddedness, her spine curling to push her chest out. “Please,” she says, because she thinks it’s something guys like to hear. Distantly, he thinks. _From my hands, I could give you something that I made, from my mouth I could sing you another brick that I laid,_ but it is just another thought, another lie, so it stays on the other side of the room, imagined. 

“On your back, I’ll eat you out,” he says quietly, putting a hand on each of her bronze inner thighs, the muscles of which are clenching and gathering with either want or shock or revulsion. He’s not sure, but it doesn’t matter, because she’s pretending she wants it. He does the same, pushing her up so he has enough room to get his head between her legs. Davey licks his lips, looking up through half-lidded eyes the mirror of hers, and kisses the Bacardi bat inked into her hip. 

He closes his eyes, and drowns. 

~*~

September 2010

“This is what happened,” Davey says. He’s looking at a cobweb on the ceiling, a soft grey barely there thing, its creator drifting back and forth lazily on her strand of translucent silk. 

“He left.” 

“I know _that_ much,” Jeffree says drolly, but his voice is gentle. Davey feels like Jeffree is speaking to him as if he is a small hurt animal, and the vibrations of sound might scare him away. 

“Can you just not say anything while I tell you this?” he asks, eyes still trained on the ceiling, where the spider is weaving. “Unless it’s constructive.” 

Jeffree doesn’t speak, and he may be nodding, but Davey can’t tell. He inhales, counting to three as he watches eight legs skitter in the air as if they were floating. “He left, and I thought he never would. I don’t think you’ve ever been in love like this, or maybe you have, but there’s this kind of in love...where you _know_ the other person won’t leave. Not because you’re naive, or because...” he stops, and then corrects himself because it seems untruthful to be using the second person. “Not because I was naive, or because I was deluded...but because I _knew._ I knew because I couldn’t breathe without him, there was no way that he didn’t feel the same way. That’s how that kind of love is...I just knew that nothing would ever make him leave, because leaving wasn’t fathomable, not an option. It’s not the kind of relationship where breaking up is the end, it’s the kind of relationship where death, mutual death, is the end.” 

It sounds dramatic as he says it, like a movie script and not the real thing. He knows that there is no way to possibly explain this kind of love to someone who isn’t Jade, and Jeffree confirms his feelings of language inadequacy by saying, very quietly, “You’re right. I have never loved like that. I’m not even sure I’ve even _loved_ , Dave, but I’m trying to understand.” 

“Thank you,” Davey mumbles as he closes his eyes, and he’s not even sure that’s the right thing to say. “We were in love like that. But then, he left.” 

He lets the word hang in the air for awhile, an unsteady, swaying word like a spider. He still think’s it’s a beautiful word, _left. Left_ , contrary to _rightness_ but not inherently wrong, misunderstood, and with that lovely short e sound that echoes in equally perfect words like _fell_ and _bled_. Jade left. Davey fell. Davey bled. 

“He didn’t do it because he was an asshole, though,” Davey says, sighing. “In part, he was. There are a lot of things about him that I understand, and I feel, but process differently than him. I mean, we are both _so different_ , different from everyone else. We always felt alone, but alone together. But I deal with that by withdrawing, reveling in my difference, embodying it. So do you,” Davey turns to Jeffree, only for a second, just so their eyes can sweep one another and he can see the lines of concentration in his brow, delicate and gossamer. 

Jeffree nods to him, encouraging.

“But he deals with it by swinging in the opposite direction. He denies his darkness, his difference. It scares him to be alone.” 

“Even if it’s alone with you?” Jeffee says, voice so soft it’s almost not there. 

Davey is quiet for a long time, worrying his hand through his hair, which is still oily with old gel and last night’s product. The spider moves her way back and forth, back and forth, determined to finish. 

“Even if it was with me. But you have to understand what I was _like_ when he left. This is why he’s not _entirely_ an asshole. I think the pictures I painted to you right when we became friends depicted either end of the extreme. Either he was a huge fucking poser and was leaving me for a girl because it was easier and he couldn’t handle it, or I was a horrible person and deserved everything he did to me. But really...it wasn’t all his fault. And I was _terrible to be with_ Jeffree, let me tell you.” Davey laughs a little bit, this dry, breathy laugh he can’t believe is coming out of him. It’s so foreign to say these things, to admit that the reality lies somewhere between two beautiful, well-constructed fictions. “I was terrible.” 

“That I believe,” Jeffree says, reaching across the very solid divide between then and putting a clammy hand on Davey’s wrist. It’s there for only a second, like a nurse testing for vital signs, finding a pulse. There are tears somewhere deep behind Davey’s eyes, and he is amazed to find that he’s not fighting them off, not on the verge of crashing down under the tide of his lies. 

“I mean, you think I’m a pain in your ass now...I was such a mess then. You know what depression is like.” 

“I do.” 

“I was depressed. And you know the way you are when you’re depressed and alone? How you don’t care how disgusting or self-pitying you get, because there’s no one to see you at your worst? That’s how I was with _him_. Because he was a part of me. Being with him was like being alone.” 

Davey’s hand flutters down to his face, rests there so he can smell his toothpaste and his soap on his fingers and his palm scrapes against the still oddly unfamiliar scrub of his beard, concave where his cheeks sink. 

He is unused to this old, gaunt face, its stony angles and ringless lip. Even after so long, he imagines himself the way he looked ten years ago, when he climbed into Jade’ room and into his arms and onto his chest and said _I feel like it’s going to tear me apart. You have to get that_ and Jade said he said he said he said he _said_ It’s okay and something else but that’s still too painful for Davey to think about, even though he knows, even though he’ll never forget. He remembers the way he felt then, smooth and clean. He remembers himself that way because that was his life. That was when it began, and when it ended, and when he was born and when he died. Everything else after that was just luck, and he should remember that but it’s hard when he’s alone alone instead of alone _with_. 

Jeffree is still silent, his breaths a muted in and out from the other side of the bed. Davey counts them, until he says “and that it what happened. I was too much to take and he was weak with fear. I think if I had even begun to think that there was a chance he would _leave_ I wouldn’t have took as much. but I just kept on taking and taking. As if he were me instead of him. And I was too much to sustain.”

“And that was what happened,” Davey repeats, because there is a neediness to the quiet between them, like his words aren’t enough. Letting his eyes drift close, Davey allows himself to feel mired in truth, and in the bleak, sludgy grey color behind his eyelids. It’s the color of two people, average and flawed and unbeautiful in dawn, instead of two gods on a stage bathed in spot lights. 

“That is _all_ that happened?” Jeffree’s voice is tentative. “But...what about her?” 

“Mmmm. Her. She’s not important,” Davey says with certainty, his eyes snapping open and finally falling on Jeffree’s, which are much less sure. It’s strange to hear that this, even _this_ is truth as it comes from his mouth. But it is, and Davey knows in the deepest folds of himself that in everything, in the world, in the end, in the music, there will always be himself and Jade, and he and Jade alone. She is just a pronoun, a thing that he loathes sometimes, pities others, was angry at once. 

 

“I didn’t always believe that,” Davey admits, letting himself half-smile at Jeffree’s raised, tweezed eyebrows. He reaches out, lets himself trace the arch of the left one with his index finger, tying himself down to this conversation to prevent floating up and becoming adhered and cocooned in sticky web. 

“Oh I know. I heard the names you called her.” Jeffree bites his lip. 

Davey nods, letting his hand drop. “She was the worst part for awhile. It just proved to me, then, that he was a coward and I was right about everything...because I wanted to badly to be right. I thought it would make him come back or something. I mean, I was so miserable. Self destructive, wanting to die, hating and loving him but not wanting to do either anymore. She was the easiest thing to pin all of my underdeveloped, two dimensional fury on. It was easy to make it all her fault.” 

“But she’s not worth that.” 

“No, she’s not. I mean, Jade left. And he didn’t come back. But he can’t stay away, even now. And that, that has to count for something.” 

Davey holds his breath for a moment. He knows that Jeffree knows that he and Jade still...still. Are standing next to one another, as artists and therefore as everything else, because that is the base that every brick is laid upon, that is the foundation of the inescapability of their mess. Still, still he has not _said_ it before. Not like this. Not with the sureness of the two words _even now._ He waits for some kind of criticism from Jeffree, even criticism dressed up as concern. 

Instead Jeffree says: “That’s the first time you’ve used his name.” 

“Jade?” Davey asks, surprised. 

“Mmhm.” 

“Interesting.”

 _Jade_. It’s also a beautiful word, Davey still thinks to. He loves saying it aloud, even now, when he must say it softly and it hurts coming out. He loves the long _a_ sound, he loves the way it’s echoed in his own name _Dave_ , he loves the way it sounds whispered against the shell of a familiar ear and he loves the way it sounds getting forced out of him and cut up into pieces. He loves the way it looks written. He loves the way it slant rhymes with _stay_. 

“Jade left,” he says, just to hear it come out of his breath. He wonders if he’s ever uttered those phrases in context, if he’s ever said those two words together and alone, meaning the things they mean to him now. “Jade left.” Jade left, Dave fell. Dave bled. Jade left. Jade left. Jade left. 

“It sounds so simple when I say it like that,” he mumbles, almost to himself. “It’s so much more than that, though. It was everything. It was impossible, and then it happened.”

“I always...I knew what happened. To some degree, anyway. I mean, I pieced it together based on the snippets I gathered between you crying and raging and being your beautiful cryptic self. And from the lyrics. So none of this, none of it is a _surprise_ , not really. But it means very much for me to hear you say it though, Dave. Even just like that, those two words.” He reaches out, encloses his long fingers around the diminutive circumference of Davey’s wrist and squeezes. Davey can feel his pulse thrumming determinedly against the cold, elegant grip, and he is strangely glad he’s still alive, and that there are still more lives to change and towers to burn down. 

“Jade left” Davey repeats, perhaps for the final time. He smiles as Jeffree, not one of his brilliant smiles with his teeth showing and his eyes bunched up, but a quick, graceful smile. The kind of smile you save for people you half-know when you pass them at the bus stop, the kind of smile you give someone when they stop in a crosswalk and let you pass. It’s detached. _Jade left_. “And he did not come back.” 

“But he can’t stay away, even now?” Jeffree asks, those eyebrows darting upward again. He waits. There is a long stretch of quiet between them, and Davey closes his eyes, stuck and sinking in grey. He only opens them when he feels the smallest dusting of life against his brow, and reaches up to sweep off a spider, glinting and black and waving its many legs in frantic salute. He watches it get lost on his hand, and eventually lets it crawl onto the wall behind him, spider-miles away from its creation. He knows it will go back, across all that dead white space that is Davey’s wall. 

“Even now.”


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The end of everything. (Just kidding I finished this and then Burials came out, lololol endless pain).

June 2011

Jade is driving up the 101 freeway, and Davey is waiting for him. 

There’s a taut anticipation in his body as he busies himself with things that don’t need to be done , like putting half-dry dishes from the rack and back into the cupboard with drips still crawling down their sides, and unmaking his bed so any semblance of propriety has been reduced to well-planned spontaneity, the fictionalized version of nonchalance. Davey waits anxiously, though, and his constant movement belies it. He flits from one room to another, pulse a quick thing and his hands like featherless birds. 

Jade is driving up the 101. Davey imagines him with his foot bare and desperate on the pedal, his stubble growing in and three-armed windmills reflecting like ghosts in his sunglasses. Davey imagines the candy wrappers, the empty coffee and soda containers littering the passenger side where he’s sat very few times because Jade bought a new car after Decemberunderground went platinum. 

Jade is perhaps on the 580 now, if there’s no traffic and he’s driving fast, as fast as Davey hopes he is, as fast as he often drives when he’s coming north. 

The ache of Davey’s empty house bears down on him, the creaks and echoes of it so constant and lonely it feels like it’s expanding.Davey sits on his bed, as wide and cold and gravelike as a bed in a sad song, and waits. His legs are crossed loosely and he’s wearing a pair of basketball shorts so he stares at his tattoos, the Sick of It All serpent twisted and faded from black to a greengrey on his calf. 

He wills himself to think of how this tattoo needs to be touched up instead of the way Jade hums along to the five disk changer, off-key and never with the melody. His house grows limbs, it grows rooms and it grows staircases. There’s a sickness inside of him, and it rises in his throat every time he looks at his clock. 

He feels like he did when he was sixteen and at his first Misfits show, when the lights went off and everyone cheered and pushed but no one was onstage yet. He feels the way he did when he was twenty one, every time Jade would come downstairs with sleep in his eyes and his hair sticking up in the back that first year they lived together, and Davey began to realize his world was shifting its orbit. He feels the way he felt the first time someone showed him an AFI tattoo, still swollen and irritated and angry black on their chest. 

Davey knows this is too much excitement, too much adrenaline. It’s an unreasonable amount for what it is, which is Jade on 580, torn and battered from expedition, but human and nothing else. Jade is undeserving of the same internal fervor stirred up by seeing your words immortalized on someone’s skin, the skin they’d die in.

Twisting a hand in his sheets, Davey reminds himself that it doesn’t matter, and even if it did, he could not help it. Davey fights himself, he fights his body, he fights the world with his body, but he doesn’t fight this. He can’t anymore, because it’s been true for more than half of his life. 

Davey is powerless against the things Jade makes him feel. He is powerless against Jade the same way he is powerless against his own body throwing up poison. Jade is an autoimmune disease, chronic and fatal and Davey will _die with this_. He used to think it was because he was holding onto it, fighting _for_ it and swearing he wouldn't die without him, this is the last time he’s leaving without. 

But now he knows that even if he tried to cut Jade out of his body, he’d be powerless. Even if he didn’t fight for it, if he laid down and died and ceded to to the tide, allowed the ship to sink to its slow, golden bed at the bottom of the sea. _Even if_. 

_Jade would have come back_. 

This is the skin they’d die in. 

Very calculatedly, Davey examines the scars on his ankles, very very old ones from over ten years ago. They’re so spindly and white they barely exist, the memories of whatever fury or self hatred or longing for sensation faded to these spider-floss soft lines of nearly forgotten pale. He rubs the wavering pathways with his index finger absently, then visualizes what it would be like to slide his nail under the edge of it, under the very tip of this very very old scar and peel it off like a sticker, leaving the skin pink and babynew underneath it. He hates the idea. 

His doorbell rings and Davey starts, eyes flicking to his phone screen, which tells him that Jade is not early, but right on time. He wants to fling himself from the bed and down the stairs like a child, he wants to throw his arms around Jade’s neck and sink into the promise of home. But because his promises have been broken and Davey hasn’t been a child for a long time, he walks, heart in this throat and unfulfilling his wish to still. 

He hears his door opening and shutting behind Jade, and swallows, trying to remember when he gave Jade that key back. Jade meets him on the stairs, in a sweat-stained polo shirt and smelling like salt and car. 

“Hey,” Jade says in a reedy voice, stopping short of the stair Davey’s on. He does not reach out. They do not touch. 

Davey begins backing his way up the stairs, eyes scouring Jade’s body like they could leave trails of blood. He feels like he’s drinking from him, from the gross, torn-down realism of Jade unhwen and filthy an imperfect and risen from the ash. “Hey.” 

They maintain this distance all the way to Davey’s bed, until the edge of it knocks Davey in the backs of his knees. He sinks into a sitting position, and Jade climbs on top of him, slower than usual, this desperate pain in his eyes making them strikingly dark, pupil-black encircled with the thinnest ring of goldbrown. He’s looking at Davey like he’s never seen him before. He’s looking at Davey like he’ll never see him again. 

A thread of panic tangles itself through the cords in Davey’s throat, and he grips Jade’s forearms with all the force of his fingers and nails. “What?”

Jade shakes his head. 

“ _What_?” Davey hisses, twisting the flesh in his fists and throwing Jade off of him and onto the bed in one swift motion, pinning Jade by the arms and shaking him, forcing his shoulders into a relenting mattress. “Tell me this isn’t the last time.” It breaks out of him, a river polluted by hurt and fear and other ugly weak things.

Jade closes his eyes, forcing Davey to fix his gaze on flickering, bruise-color lids. “Dave, even if I wanted it to be, it wouldn’t. It couldn’t.” 

Davey knows this, but forgets that Jade knows it too. He feels briefly absurd, but still unsure because the intensity of the way Jade was looking at him still burns on his skin. “What, then?” He breathes, relenting the fierceness of his grip. 

Shaking his head again, Jade lets his eyes slide open. “Just that. This.” 

There is the pause of many heartbeats, because their hearts are beating fast. 

“This,” Davey echoes, something wet and salty dripping down his nose and landing on Jade’s cheek like a bit of liquid crystal. He blinks, and more comes out. 

After a brief struggle, Jade is able to free his hand enough he can reach up and cup Davey’s face, a thumb sliding through the tears.Davey tilts his cheek into the touch, rough skin against a rough palm, both soothed by the memory of fifteen years ago, before everything was tarnished and they were smooth and young and ruining their chance at purity.

Davey remembers all the times he told himself that any disappointment or misery that came of this would be worth one second of Jade’s thumb in his tears. One second of Jade’s palm on his hip. One second of Jade’s lips on his lips. One second of Jade’s mouth on his dick. He thinks that he was young and very stupid then, but right, if only because he is choosing to be right, and might still be stupid. He opens his eyes and watches Jade watching him, and thinks _I am home,_ and _I will watch him forever_. 

Even after the ship has sunk, the highest mass still swaying in half-decomposed grandeur against the horizon, this is the skin they will die in. 

Jade rolls him over, puts one hand through his hair and pushes up his shirt with the other. Davey lays there passively, allowing Jade’s still scary-dark eyes to sweep his chest, his sternum, his navel. “Suck in?” Jade asks without looking up, gaze still darting between daggers and stars and a heart that’s on fire. 

Davey does so without asking why, even though he’s curious. He hasn’t eaten today to his stomach tucks in to his spine, organs and empty deteriorating to nearly nothing. His ribcage stands out on stark relief, hip bones two angry jutting things and muscles quivering. 

“I used to imagine what you’d look like with your clothes off, even though I’d seen it a thousand times before,” Jade starts, very, very gently touching Davey’s sunken self with the tips of his fingers. “And after that, I’d imagine you without your tattoos, just you. Just your skin. Even though I’d seen that before too, when we were kids.” 

Davey lets his breath out, expanding, fitting himself into Jade’s hand. 

“But now, it’s almost easier to imagine you with your skin off. And not just your skin, I guess, your flesh, everything, Like I know exactly what you’d look like just as a skeleton. I even know your bones.” He bends and kisses Davey’s sternum. His hair tickles. 

“I don’t make it hard to imagine. There’s not much more than bones.” 

“There could be anything. I would still imagine it just the same. I would still know it.” 

He is moved and there is nothing else to say, so Davey uses the strength left in his stomach to sit up and kiss Jade. And for one second of Jade’s lips on his lips, they are perfect. They kiss for a long time, spread out on top of each other with Davey’s shirt still rucked up around his neck and Jade’s shoes still on. Their are palms hot and bruising, tongues slicked together with so much spit Davey’s chin feels wet but he doesn’t care because the taste of Jade will be something he remembers tomorrow, next week, when he dies. 

There is wet everywhere, in their eyes and on their cheeks. Between their bodies where their skin is touching and rubbing together. Davey thinks, far away, alien _It’s always summer in LA_ and then remembers that they’re in his haunted house. His chest hurts so badly at this moment that he thinks it will split open and Jade will fall in and drown, but still never stop kissing him. 

And Davey is not a hero. He’s not abstaining from anything. He’s taking what he wants, and taking what he can get, and lying through his teeth so it doesn’t hurt as badly. 

They’ll never be heros of art. They’ll die in their skin unable to transcend flesh, animals base and breathing and wanting and taking and lying, all under the pretense of something beautiful, something immortal. But Davey doesn’t care, not right now, because his nails are buried blood deep in the skin he will die in, and Jade’s spit is on his chin.

The sheets shift and burn under his back as Jade pushes into him. It’s a perfect burn, inside and outside. Davey hates that in a couple of days, though, it will fade. Like scars and like purity, and like the ephemeral wish that one is a hero of art, instead of a hero of love. Digging his teeth into the bone of a shoulder, Davey lets his eyes slide shut around the bliss of being filled, and thinks with a quiet, sad resignation about how beauty is impermanent and that is what makes it beautiful. 

Then Jade comes inside of him, and miraculously, that thought is followed by: _this is the skin I will die in._


End file.
